They do feel [too]! But who, and what?

Nearly twenty years ago, a series of striking stickers began appearing in public spaces across different cities, including Budapest, Berlin, London, Edinburgh and Washington, D.C. They appeared in clearly visible places and carried a simple but powerful message. Anyone interested could download print-ready PDFs from the project’s website, pick up copies in person from its creator (who happens to be the founder of my Tikkun too), or simply share a mailing address to receive stickers by post, free of charge.

The stickers were built around two central ideas. The first was that sentience, not usefulness to humans, should decide how a being is treated – reflected e.g. in a cat + cow motif, meant to dissolve the arbitrary line between “pet” and “farm animal.” The second was personal responsibility: many stickers showed standard factory-farming practices next to two plain options, “OK” and “NOT OK,” leaving the viewer to quietly work out where they stood.

That “OK / NOT OK” format wasn’t just a design choice – it reflects a specific idea about how change happens. The project speaks of confronting the “ruling narrative” people absorb almost without noticing: the unexamined assumption that using animals is simply the natural order of things. Putting a stark, personal choice in front of someone in an everyday public setting is a way of nudging the Overton window – the range of positions a society currently treats as reasonable – just slightly, one passer-by at a time. Enough of those small nudges, the thinking goes, and what was once a fringe view can tip into the mainstream.

Since then, the “They Do Feel” project has grown far beyond its original form. It found its ideological home within the philosophy of Tikkun. Today, one of its most important missions is to encourage people to take part in repairing the World: to think, to feel, but most importantly, to act. Even through small changes in everyday life, the aim is to live in a way that causes less harm to the sentient beings who share our environment.

The project’s website, theydofeel.org, is still live today, and photographs of those original stickers from back then can still be found on the project’s Instagram page.