01.11.2025

World Vegan Month 2025: She Has One precious Life, Will Your Dinner Take It?

Sentience: the ability to feel

A vital aim of our campaigns is to help non-vegans in our speciesist culture, make the connection between the everyday products they consume and the sentient animals those products came from. Once that connection is made between one product and one animal, that fact cannot be unknown. It is extrapolated to every non-vegan product in our lives, every way in which we enjoy life at the expense of animals who share our ability to feel but are used as objects and violently killed for us.

The Animals at Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary

The animals who live at our sanctuary, Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary, are the backbone of our campaign. Those of us looking after them on a daily basis, from the moment they enter through our gates to the final moment of their lives, are constantly learning from them. These facts, learned at first hand from them, remind us of why we are vegan. Like us, they experience physical and psychological states that are pleasurable or painful. Like us, they want to maximise pleasant experiences and avoid painful or distressing ones. Like us, they have social lives and form close bonds with other animals and with their human caregivers. Like us, they remember the past, anticipate the future, make decisions based on past experience, are motivated to survive, have preferences and value their lives.

Our outdoor and social media educational campaigns convey facts to the public that are key in helping people go vegan. Our campaigning work is immensely enriched by the unique, individual animals on our sanctuary who feature in our ads. We make public information that the industry carefully conceals in its effort to have us believe that other animals are commodities, things or resources, and that their use is essential for human wellbeing. Other animals are not things. They are feeling beings like us. We have no nutritional need for any animal product. We can be healthy and happy on a 100% plant diet and a lifestyle that avoids exploiting any animal. We breed them into excruciatingly miserable lives and force them to experience a premature, violent death that we ourselves would dread, simply to meet our desire for taste, tradition, habit and profit.

Angel: The Slaughterhouse Rescue

Angel is one of a group of ten sheep who came within a hair’s breadth of losing their lives in 2019. They had been left for four days at a holding facility at the slaughterhouse, their deaths postponed due to a farmer’s protest. It rained heavily during those four days and the river rose and gradually encroached on the ground where they were being held, causing one of them to lose her life. The remaining ten were rescued and found a home at Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary.

On arrival they were in very poor health but they recovered very quickly with appropriate veterinary care and the facilities provided by the sanctuary.

In the intervening years, they have enjoyed respect and care that they had never before experienced and each of them has blossomed. Angel is a very quiet, sedate sheep. She loves the company of other sheep with whom she spends her days grazing, resting in the sun, or taking shelter in their comfortable barn. She has come to trust and enjoy human company but her favourite thing in life is to be left in peace with a plentiful supply of fresh grass and some treats. The last thing on Angel’s mind is hurting or exploiting anyone. In complete contrast to those who farmed her for profit, those who intended to violently end her life, and the non-vegans who supported her exploitation and demanded her death for the sake of animal flesh and wool, Angel is a peace-loving, innocent being who has never harmed anyone.

She is the inspiration for our current ad which recently ran in London and is now running throughout Ireland in celebration of World Vegan Month 2025.

Making the Connection

In Ireland, almost three million sheep are slaughtered annually (CSO, 2024). At least half a billion sheep are slaughtered globally every year. Each one of them is like Angel. She has one precious life that would have been brutally ended if she hadn’t found a home on a vegan sanctuary. When a non-vegan makes the decision to spend money on an animal product, someone, somewhere, lives a miserable life and dies a violent, premature death to meet that demand. If you met Angel in the supermarket when you are deciding what to have for dinner, would you be able to kill her? Would you be able to justify her death simply because you like the taste of her flesh? If your answer is no, please research animal rights and consider going vegan, and reach out to us if you need support.

References

Central Statistics Office, 2024 Accessed 12.09.2025

Slaughterhouse releases ten sheep to Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary