World Animal Day is celebrated each year on October the 4th. It started in Florence, Italy in 1931 at a convention of ecologists. On this day, animal life in all its forms is celebrated, and special events are planned in locations all over the globe. The 4th of October was originally chosen for World Animal Day because it is the feast day of Francis of Assisi, a nature lover and patron saint of animals and the environment. Numerous churches throughout the world observe the Sunday closest to October the 4th with a Blessing of the Animals.
World Animal Day, however, has now gone beyond being the celebration of a Christian saint and is today observed by animal-lovers of all beliefs, nationalities and backgrounds. Animal blessings are held in churches, synagogues, and by independent animal chaplains in parks and fields. Animal rescue shelters hold fundraising events and open days, wildlife groups organize information displays, schools undertake animal-related project work and individuals and groups of friends or co-workers donate to animal charities or pledge to sponsor a shelter animal.
In Argentina it is celebrated on April 29 as a tribute to the death (in 1926) of Dr. Lucas Ignacio Albarracín. Albarracín was, along with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, one of the founders of the Sociedad Argentina Protectora de Animales (Argentine Society of Protection of Animals) and the proponent of the National Law on Protection of Animals (No. 2786).
Famous quotes containing the words world, animal and/or day:
“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The moose will, perhaps, one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns ... to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The democratic youth ... lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practising gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)