A man who urged his dog to attack and kill badgers kept footage of the brutal fights on his phone, a court heard today.

Vietnam's rare mammals may be sliding towards extinction, but Britain's rarest butterfly is going from strength to strength, a series of contrasting announcements makes clear today.

A judicial review is to be held into the Government's decision to allow badgers to be killed in England to halt the spread of bovine TB.

As Robert Holman's touching triptych of war plays is revived at the Donmar, Paul Taylor salutes an undervalued but endlessly powerful playwright

Crucifixion, Channel 4's film about Gunther von Hagens' latest exercise in human taxidermy, was like one of those fairground chimeras mocked up in the 19th century to milk the gullible of their pennies.

Hope lives on among fans that the franchise will be revived but perhaps it's better not to go back – even today the first two Earthworm Jim games are jewels of the genre, always there to pick you up when you need a little rampant absurdity in your life.

Voices: Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, Imelda Staunton, Brian Blessed

Vital medical research is being "choked off" because airlines and ferry companies are refusing to bring animals into the country for testing in the face of pressure from animals' rights activists, a former science minister has warned.

Our writer finds in the story of the police horse lent to Rebekah Brooks a Swiftian satire that highlights animal nobility and human awfulness

Ministers will today dash hopes of an immediate ban on the use of wild animals in circuses.

The Great Divide is one of several recent books on the deep ecological roots of human history, a trend begun by Jared Diamond with Guns, Germs and Steel (1997). Peter Watson takes some leads from Diamond but goes much further in his attempt to rescue the pre-Columbian world of the Americas from the contempt and even hatred expressed by many at the time of the 2009 Aztec exhibition at the British Museum. One article called the artefacts on display "As evil as Nazi lampshades made from human skin".

There's an obvious machismo problem if you're going to move from presenting a programme about tectonic forces to a series about botany. With the former you can abseil off the lip of an active volcano or do a piece to camera while diving into the flooded rift between two continental plates. It's positively Action Man compared to wandering through a wood and looking at flowers. So, kudos to Iain Stewart and the How to Grow a Planet production team for coming up with the most aggressively blokey way possible to convey the evolutionary advantage that toughened seeds confer on those plants that have them. Load up an empty shotgun cartridge with canna indica seeds and blast away at a plywood target. Excellent. You can do the slow-motion footage of the muzzle-flash. You can get your presenter to prod his finger through the smashed bull's-eye. And then you can plant the recovered "ammunition" and show how they can still do what seeds are meant to. If Guy Ritchie had been asked to film a GCSE biology module this is what it might have looked like. Except Vinnie Jones would have been wielding the shotgun, obviously.

It's quite a Tory year coming up – what with the Queen's Jubilee, Boris's victory in the mayoral elections, Lord Coe's Olympics, the anniversary of the Falklands. Cameron seems to have lifted himself up an energy level to meet it. He's fizzing. He sometimes goes off in the wrong direction but his blast-area has doubled in size since the Opposition collapse.

Some scientists failed to publish any details of their research, which could have stopped repetition of their work