Why Animal Week Matters — And What We’re Doing
Nae Vegan ShoesEvery 4 October, World Animal Day brings the global movement for animal welfare, freedom and rights together for a single day with a single purpose: to raise the status of animals everywhere. It has been running since 1925, when the German writer Heinrich Zimmermann organised the first one in Berlin, and it has been coordinated since 2003 by the UK charity Naturewatch Foundation, which now supports more than ninety ambassadors across some seventy countries. Last year it turned a hundred.
It rarely arrives alone. The first week of October has quietly become an animal week.
Different organisers, different emphases, one underlying question.
The theme this year is the argument
Each year Naturewatch invites the public to propose a theme. For 2026 they chose one submitted by a contributor from the UK: See the World Through Their Eyes. Her reasoning was that on a planet increasingly shaped by human activity, we tend to make decisions from a human-centred position — and that it might be worth trying a different pair of eyes.
Naturewatch put the consequence plainly: when we genuinely see the world through their eyes, our choices begin to change.
We would go one step further, because it is the part people find hardest. Seeing through another’s eyes is not primarily an exercise of sympathy. It is an exercise of attention — of taking seriously what is actually there. And the evidence about what is there has moved enormously. Animals hold beliefs and revise them when the world proves them wrong; they remember particular individuals for years; they plan for needs that have not yet arrived; they read what others know. We wrote about that at length in our piece on animal minds. A theme like this year’s is not asking for sentiment. It is asking for accuracy.
Seeing through another’s eyes isn’t sympathy. It’s accuracy — taking seriously what is actually there.
Three reasons, not one
The case for taking animals seriously is usually made in one register at a time. It is stronger, and more honest, when the three are held together — because they turn out to be the same argument seen from different angles.
For animals —
An animal is a being with a perspective and a will of its own. Ending or using such a life takes something from someone, whether or not it hurts — which is why ‘humane’ handling settles less than it appears to.
For the planet —
Animal agriculture is a leading driver of deforestation and a major methane source. Bovine leather carries a carbon footprint many times that of its alternatives, and its tanning stage relies on chromium and other chemicals that pollute water and soil.
For justice —
The same hierarchy that subordinates animals has historically subordinated others — and the two are held in place by the same set of ideas.
The argument most people haven’t heard
That third line deserves unpacking, because it is the least familiar and, we think, the most interesting.
Ecofeminist philosophy — in Spain, the work of Alicia Puleo and Angélica Velasco Sesma among others — starts from an observation about how Western thought is built. It runs on paired opposites in which one side is always superior. Those pairs are not neutral.
The same logic of domination has been applied to women, to nature and to animals alike.
From which two consequences follow. The first is that these are not separate causes that happen to attract similar people; they are structurally connected, and a feminism that ignores our relation with nature is, as Karen Warren argued, necessarily incomplete.
The second is sharper, and concerns why animal ethics is so easily brushed aside. Because concern for animals sits on the emotional, caring, feminised side of that divide, it gets filed as sentimentality rather than as reasoning — an aesthetic preference rather than an argument. The ethics of care makes exactly the opposite claim: that attention to a particular vulnerable other is not a lapse in rational judgement but a legitimate and necessary form of it. Reason can tell us what is the case. It is our capacity to be affected that turns ‘this creature suffers’ into ‘I will not do this.’
Which brings the point back to the theme. Seeing the world through their eyes is precisely the operation that a certain style of thinking has spent centuries telling us not to bother with.
Why a shoe company has a stake in this
It would be easy for a footwear brand to treat an animal awareness day as a communications opportunity and leave it there. We have a more direct stake than that, because leather is where the question stops being abstract.
Hides are often described as a by-product of the meat industry, as though they were simply going spare. In practice they are a co-product with real commercial value, and that value forms part of the economics that make the whole enterprise work. A hide is what remains of an animal that had somewhere to be.
What we’re doing
NAE has been fully vegan since 2008 — not as a seasonal position but as the reason the company exists. The name is an acronym: No Animal Exploitation. In practice that means:
- No animal materials at all, in any product, in any season. Our uppers, linings, soles, insoles, adhesives and glues are all animal-free, and we are PETA-Approved Vegan.
- Alternatives that are actually made of something, rather than plastic with a kinder label — cork, apple leather, pineapple fibre, cactus leather, recycled PET and certified microfibre. You can see the full range on our materials page.
- Honesty about the limits. Vegan does not automatically mean sustainable, and we say so rather than letting the words blur; we set out the whole argument in are vegan shoes sustainable?.
- The same scrutiny applied to people. We publish what our supply-chain oversight does and does not cover in our work ethics reporting — the reasoning is here — because a consistent ethic cannot stop at the species line.
- Keeping shoes in use. Our Pre-Loved programme exists because the least harmful pair is the one already made.
And this week in particular
As we do every year, our prices are at their lowest for the week around World Animal Day.
That probably deserves an explanation, because a sale during an ethics week can look like a contradiction — and we have spent a good deal of this blog arguing for buying less rather than more. The point is not volume.
Price is one of the most common reasons people give for not choosing animal-free products, and it is a perfectly reasonable one. Making shoes without animal materials, in Europe, at decent standards, costs what it costs; for a lot of people that puts the choice out of reach. For one week a year we take as much of that barrier away as we can.
So the invitation is not to fill a basket. If the argument in this article is any good, the least we can do is make acting on it cheaper — and if you need one pair, this is the week to buy one that will last you years.
Taking part
World Animal Day is deliberately open: anyone can register an event on the official website and receive materials for it. Naturewatch also runs its Donate a Dinner campaign, which supports the shelters doing the unglamorous daily work, and a design competition for anyone who would rather contribute with a pencil than a petition.
If you want something smaller and more immediate, the theme suggests its own exercise. Pick one animal you would normally not think about — not the one on your sofa, the one behind something you own — and spend a minute considering the day from where it stands. That is the entire proposal, and it is harder than it sounds.
You can read more about the thinking we work from on our values page. And if this is your first year paying attention to any of this: welcome. It is a good week to start.
