World Animal Day unites animal welfare movement
WORLD Animal Day is an annual event that happens on the 4th October every year, in celebration and memory of the feast day of St Francis of Assissi, the patron saint of animals.
The day is an international focus of efforts around the world to raise the status of animals in order to improve welfare standards. The celebration of World Animal Day has united the animal welfare movement, mobilising it into a global force to make the world a better place for all animals. It’s celebrated in different ways in every country, irrespective of nationality, religion, faith or political ideology. The aim is that through increased awareness and education we can together create a world where animals are always recognised as sentient beings and full regard is always paid to their welfare. This aligns completely with my own personal values.
Events are organised all around the world. Fundraisers, awareness raisers and just talking about animals happens online, on paper, on the radio, on tv and in real life. You can find out more at the World Animal Day website, at www. worldanimalday.org.uk.
There’s another interesting happening that’s linked to this celebration: the annual blessing of animals at many locations.
This occurs across many different faiths. I’ve been to many blessings of animals in my own home town, and I have seen all sorts of creatures attend, from dogs and cats to hamsters and guinea pigs, rabbits and snakes, and even ducks and hens. The basic message is that animals are an important part of our human lives, and they deserve to be valued and appreciated.
There has been a transformation in how we see animals in my lifetime. When I trained as a vet, animals were seen as bundles of unthinking living tissue. The idea was that they were so different to us humans that we had the right to treat them utterly differently. Yes, we were bound to treat them with compassion, but still, they could not be seen in any way in the same light as humans. To treat them like humans was a step too far. If people remarked how much animals seemed to be like us, they were told that they were being anthropomorphic, projecting human thoughts and emotions onto creatures that were not capable of such depth.
When I trained as a vet, it was acceptable to use animals as training models, taking their lives casually: I remember witnessing a dog being bled to death deliberately (under anaesthesia, so the dog did not suffer) in order to teach us students the physiological consequences of blood loss. My class of students was appalled at this: complaints were made, and the practice stopped from then on. But the fact that it happened at all says a lot about how animals were seen at that time, nearly forty years ago.
This casual attitude to the lives of animals had impacts in other areas too. In 1990, thirty years ago, around 30000 dogs - that’s over 100 dogs every working day - were euthanased in Irish dog pounds. This happened simply because they were unwanted, and because it happened behind closed doors, most people knew nothing about it. One of the vets whose job it was to euthanase dogs in his local pound was so appalled at what was happening that he took steps towards setting up a national forum to tackle this. The impact has been huge: these days, less than a thousand dogs - or four dogs every working day - are euthanased. We would all like this figure to be even lower, but the truth is that some stray dogs cannot be rehomed, for various reasons, from severe aggression to serious illness. My point this week is
that the improved statistics directly reflect how our attitude to animals has changed: it is no longer acceptable to dispense with dogs’ lives just because it’s convenient to do so. We, rightly, now give the individual lives of dogs a greater value.
Over the same period, attitudes towards livestock farming have changed, with more attention given to ensuring that all animals have lives that are worth living. New legislation has been introduced in many countries (including Ireland) asserting that all animals must have five freedoms - freedom from fear and distress, freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from discomfort in their environment, freedom to avoid pain, injury and disease, and freedom to express natural behaviours. There are still many issues, of course, but our cultures around the world have all been moving towards better lives for animals.
This all ties in with an improved understanding of the consciousness of animals: through advanced dynamic imaging such as enhanced MRI studies, we now know that animals have neural activity in precisely the same parts of the brain as humans when they are happy, sad, excited or depressed. We now know, for sure, than animals are “sentient beings”, sharing with us the capacity to experience sensations.
The prevailing scientific view now is that all higher members of the animal kingdom (above sponges) possess sentience. In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, by the world’s leading scientists, confirmed this global understanding. If an animal looks like it is feeling an emotion, then it almost certainly is.
During this World Animal Week, take a moment to value the animals in your life. They deserve our full appreciation.