Animals Have a Soul: World Animal Day,
October 4 2020
Help protect our fellow creatures!
October 4 each year is World Animal Day. This year we invite you to take part in a simple campaign born from empathy and love for our animal friends: We will forego animal products from industrial mass production for this day. These products are associated with unbearable suffering of animals as well as the psychological agony of people who have to work in fattening farms, slaughterhouses, animal laboratories and other places of animal abuse.
Photo by Jess Sloss
Why?
- No other sector contributes so massively to the loss of biodiversity, to the destabilisation of the climate, to the overuse of chemical fertilisers or threatens our health as much industrial meat and milk production.
- The unprecedented deforestation and scale of slash and burn in the Amazon is not a natural disaster, but a direct consequence of industrial beef production and the soy plantations on which fodder used worldwide for industrial animal production is grown. The Amazon is the lungs of the Earth, and its destruction concerns us all! The trees breathe out what we humans and other animals breathe in – and generate rain. This is how closely we are connected to the Earth.
- The pesticides sprayed on the soy fields pollute rivers and make animals and people sick.
- The world is a unified whole. Even if we don’t see the consequences of our behaviour directly, they return to us as fear, illness or suffering. When we ingest the meat, milk or eggs of tortured beings, we literally eat fear and horror.
“I can imagine a world – because it has always existed – in which humans and animals make a covenant and live together in peace and harmony, a world that day by day is transformed by the magic of love. A world that is free from death. This is not a dream.”
Henry MillerGet involved!
Inquire about the conditions in which the animals lived whose products you are enjoying today! Help ensure that fair meat dishes and dairy products are offered in restaurants! Support farmers who treat their animals appropriately, with respect and dignity. In our region, Alentejo, Portugal, we’ve found positive examples of a few free range farms producing their own organic fodder and providing animals with space.
There are alternatives. For example, “Holistic Planned Grazing,” a species-appropriate animal husbandry method that could be decisive in the global fight against climate change. When large grazing animals can move around in such a way that the soil is used but not overexploited, as they did in earlier times, they help revitalize it so that it can retain rainwater and build humus.
World Animal Day is celebrated annually in honour of St. Francis of Assisi on his name day, October 4. In the 13th century, he was a living example of loving cooperation between humans and animals. For him, the animals were our natural brothers and sisters.
When we humans re-acknowledge the soul and spiritual powers of animals, we will enter into a new covenant of trust and reintegrate our lives into nature. We will experience how animals approach us, how much they seek our closeness – how much they want to love us. And how much we humans heal as a result. A humane world is rooted in an ethic of affection for all who have skin and fur!