Animal advocacy uniquely prompts people to align moral belief with personal behaviour. It’s not necessary to do this in order to be effective at reducing animal suffering, but if you don’t, then the incoherency is always lurking within. That creates a level of psychological friction that other cause areas don’t have—we aren’t directly contributing to malaria or x-risk in the same way most of us are implicated in factory farming. It’s plausible that this shows up as a gap between what people endorse in surveys and how resources get allocated.
I’m not sure we should expect stated preferences and real-world allocations to line up neatly. Large funders may be counterbalancing where the rest of the community drifts in its actions, and in that sense divergence isn’t obviously a bad thing.
If we do think the gap is a problem, I think fixing careers is an under-explored avenue. Animal advocacy still seems like a hard place to build a stable, respected long-term career. Retention, senior leadership depth, and longevity all seem thinner than in other cause areas. My hunch is that this cause area ends up being a ‘seasonal’ phase, with talent drifting toward better-resourced areas that can better place senior talent.
I agree re the career problem. I wonder how much additional money would fix the problem vs other issues like the cultures of the two movements/ecosystems, status of working in the spaces, etc.
Animal advocacy uniquely prompts people to align moral belief with personal behaviour. It’s not necessary to do this in order to be effective at reducing animal suffering, but if you don’t, then the incoherency is always lurking within. That creates a level of psychological friction that other cause areas don’t have—we aren’t directly contributing to malaria or x-risk in the same way most of us are implicated in factory farming. It’s plausible that this shows up as a gap between what people endorse in surveys and how resources get allocated.
I’m not sure we should expect stated preferences and real-world allocations to line up neatly. Large funders may be counterbalancing where the rest of the community drifts in its actions, and in that sense divergence isn’t obviously a bad thing.
If we do think the gap is a problem, I think fixing careers is an under-explored avenue. Animal advocacy still seems like a hard place to build a stable, respected long-term career. Retention, senior leadership depth, and longevity all seem thinner than in other cause areas. My hunch is that this cause area ends up being a ‘seasonal’ phase, with talent drifting toward better-resourced areas that can better place senior talent.
I agree re the career problem. I wonder how much additional money would fix the problem vs other issues like the cultures of the two movements/ecosystems, status of working in the spaces, etc.