Through Their Eyes
Today is World Animal Day, a day that has held a very special place in my heart for many years.
And this year’s theme, Through Their Eyes, feels especially powerful.
If, like me, you love animals, care deeply about our precious natural world or simply believe in kindness and fairness, I invite you today to pause for a moment and see the world through their eyes.
Through Their Eyes
As a little girl, I didn’t know words like sentience, cognition or agency. I simply knew there was someone looking back at me.
Someone behind the eyes.
All these years and many thousands of animals later, I still believe that little girl was right. And perhaps that is why this year’s World Animal Day theme, Through Their Eyes, speaks so deeply to me.
Because it asks us to do something both simple and extraordinarily powerful.
See the world through their eyes.
Through the eyes of the dog who trusts you completely. The hen feeling sunshine warm her feathers for the first time. The mumma cow searching for the baby taken from her. The koala watching their home disappear. And the whale travelling ancient pathways through an ocean we have changed.
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And perhaps even through the eyes of an animal whose life has become so familiar, so normalised, that we have forgotten to wonder what the world looks like from where they stand.
Because once we do, something shifts.
They cease to be something and become someone.
And their fear, joy, comfort, curiosity, friendships and desire to live become harder to leave outside the boundaries of our kindness.
For all my life, animals have been teaching me that creating a kinder world for them does not require us to become less human.
It invites us to become more humane.
More curious about lives different from our own, more compassionate in how we meet them and more courageous in allowing that compassion to shape the choices we make.
And perhaps that is the greatest promise of seeing the world through their eyes.
We may finally see our own place in it more clearly. And maybe that little girl did understand something long before she had the words to explain it. There really is someone behind those eyes.
And in changing the way we see their world, we may just change the world they see.
Pam Ahern OAM
Australian World Animal Day Ambassador
