Animals
Save the Frogs Day
In 2008, Dr Kerry Kriger, an American ecologist who had spent his doctoral research in Northern California watching frog populations disappear from …
Topic
Animals
Special days celebrating the animals we share the planet with, from beloved pets to threatened wildlife.
43 articles
Animals
World Snow Leopard Day
On 23 October 2013, in a conference hall in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, delegations from all twelve countries where wild snow leopards still roam sat down …
Animals
International Sloth Day
In 2010, at a rescue and rehabilitation centre in Colombia’s Caldas department, staff at the AIUNAU Foundation set aside a day to draw attention …
Animals
World Pangolin Day
Somewhere in a forest in Vietnam, Cameroon or Java, on the third Saturday of every February, an animal that most people cannot name is quietly running …
Animals
World Wildlife Day
On 3 March 1973, representatives of eighty governments meeting in Washington, D.C. signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species …
Animals
World Turtle Day
In 1990, a married couple in Malibu, California, Susan Tellem and Marshall Thompson, founded American Tortoise Rescue after watching too many pet …
Animals
World Rhino Day
In 2010 the South African arm of the World Wide Fund for Nature announced a date, 22 September, on which the world might turn its attention to an …
Animals
World Penguin Day
At McMurdo Station, the American research base on Ross Island in Antarctica, the scientists who wintered over noticed a pattern in the Adélie penguins …
Animals
World Migratory Bird Day
In 1993, ornithologists at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington launched a modest awareness event they called International Migratory …
Animals
World Lion Day
In 2013 two people who had spent decades pointing cameras at big cats decided the animal they loved best needed a day of its own. Dereck and Beverly …
Animals
World Farm Animals Day
In the summer of 1981, a chemist named Alex Hershaft gathered animal-rights pioneers at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for a …
Animals
World Animal Day
On 24th March 1925, more than five thousand people crowded into the Sport Palace in Berlin for a cause that had never before filled a hall that size: …
Animals
US National Pigs in a Blanket Day
In 1957, the fictional American kitchen authority Betty Crocker published Cooking for Boys and Girls, and somewhere in its pages appeared the earliest …
Animals
US National Hot Dog Day
In 1867, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman pushed a pie wagon through the sand of Coney Island and, according to the most repeated account, hit …
Animals
US National Frog Legs Day
In 2013, archaeologists sifting through ancient food remains at a site near Stonehenge in Wiltshire found a charred amphibian leg bone, dated to …
Animals
US National Corndog Day
In 1992, in the basement of a house in Corvallis, Oregon, two students named Brady Sahnow and Henry Otley settled in for a marathon of the college …
Animals
US National Cook For Your Pets Day
Around 1860, an American electrician named James Spratt arrived in London selling lightning rods and noticed dogs along the docks scavenging the hard …
Animals
US National Cat Day
In 2004, French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne announced a find from the Neolithic site of Shillourokambos on Cyprus: a grave, some 9,500 …
Animals
Reptile Awareness Day
On a handful of windswept islands off New Zealand lives an animal that has barely changed since long before the first dinosaurs walked. The tuatara, a …
Animals
Plush Animal Lovers Day
On 14 November 1902, on a hunting trip near the Mississippi border, President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear that his guides had …
Animals
Pig Day
In 1972 two American sisters decided that the pig had been badly served by its reputation and set out to do something about it. Ellen Stanley, who …
Animals
Pet Rock Day
One evening in 1975, in a bar in Los Gatos, California, an advertising copywriter named Gary Dahl listened to his friends complain about their pets — …
Animals
Penguin awareness day
By most accounts, Penguin Awareness Day began with a husband writing on his wife’s calendar. The date usually cited is 1972, and the man is …
Animals
No Beard Day
When Alexander the Great ordered his Macedonian soldiers to shave before the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, he was not making a fashion statement. A …
Animals
National Pet Day
Colleen Paige adopted her first shelter dog, a Sheltie, when she was ten years old, and the experience set the course of a career. An animal …
Animals
National Mutt Day
In a shelter kennel somewhere this morning there is a dog whose paperwork reads, in the space marked “breed”, something hopeful and …
Animals
National Llama Day
A llama hums. Not a tuneful sound, more a low, resonant mmm that a mother makes to her newborn cria within minutes of its birth so the pair can …
Animals
National Kazoo Day
On 9 January 1883, the United States Patent Office issued patent number 270,543 to an inventor named Warren Herbert Frost for what he called a …
Animals
National Dog Day
When Colleen Paige was ten years old, her family drove to a local animal shelter and brought home a Sheltie. Decades later, as a pet lifestyle expert …
Animals
International Whale Shark Day
In 1828, a British army surgeon named Andrew Smith, then living in Cape Town, examined a 4.6-metre fish that had been harpooned in Table Bay and gave …
Animals
International Tiger Day
In November 2010, in a cold conference hall in St Petersburg, the heads of government of thirteen countries made a promise about an animal. The global …
Animals
International Rabbit Day
In 1998 a London-based welfare organisation called The Rabbit Charity set aside a Saturday in late September and gave it a name, and International …
Animals
International Cat Day
In 2004, French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne reported a discovery at the Neolithic site of Shillourokambos in Cyprus that quietly rewrote …
Animals
International Beaver Day
On 7 April every year the conservation calendar pauses for a rodent, which is rarer than it sounds. International Beaver Day was established in 2009 …
Animals
Howl At The Moon Day
On a still night in Yellowstone, a wolf’s howl can carry roughly ten miles across the valleys — far enough that a scattered pack can find one …
Animals
Farm Animals Day
In 2005, Colleen Paige, an American animal rescuer and pet lifestyle author, added another date to a calendar she was steadily filling with her own …
Animals
Elephant Appreciation Day
The day began with a paperweight. In the 1990s, Wayne Hepburn, who ran a Florida graphics and publishing company called Mission Media, was given a …
Animals
Dress Up Your Pet Day
In 2009, the pet lifestyle expert and animal behaviourist Colleen Paige added another date to a calendar she had already begun shaping, slotting Dress …
Animals
Cow Appreciation Day
In 1995, a three-dimensional billboard went up in Atlanta showing two black-and-white dairy cows perched on a ledge, paintbrush in hoof, daubing a …
Animals
Bowling Day
In 1895, the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie was excavating a child’s grave at Naqada in Upper Egypt when he turned up a set of small …
Animals
Assistance Dog Day
In 1929, a wealthy American dog breeder named Dorothy Harrison Eustis opened a school in Morristown, New Jersey, with a deliberately plain name: The …
Animals
Appreciate a Dragon Day
In 2004 the American fantasy author Donita K. Paul wanted a memorable way to mark the launch of her novel “DragonSpell”, the first in her …
Animals
Animal Crackers Day
In 1902 the National Biscuit Company, the firm we now know as Nabisco, sold a small box of biscuits with a string handle threaded across the top. The …