04/10/2026
🐾 World Animal Day 2026 – Seeing the world through their eyes
Today, 4 October, we celebrate **World Animal Day**, an opportunity to reflect on our relationships with the other animals with whom we share the planet.
This year’s theme "See the World Through Their Eyes" speaks directly to some of the questions at the heart of animal welfare and animal ethics.
What does it mean to consider an animal’s perspective?
It means going beyond asking what animals provide for us or what we expect from them. It means paying attention to their needs and preferences, their capacities and vulnerabilities, their social relationships, and the ways in which our individual and collective choices affect their lives.
Science can help us understand how animals experience their environments and what contributes to their welfare. Ethics asks us what we should do with that knowledge, whose interests should count in our decisions, and what responsibilities follow from our relationships with other animals. Law and public policy, in turn, shape how those responsibilities are translated into rules, institutions, and practices.
These different perspectives were at the heart of SAWE – School of Animal Welfare and Ethics: bringing science, ethics, and law into dialogue, and encouraging students and professionals to question how knowledge can contribute to better decisions for animals.
World Animal Day reminds us that improving animal welfare is not only about knowing more about animals. It is also about learning to "take their perspective seriously".
And perhaps that is where meaningful change begins.
