Reservations about donating for animal welfare charities
tl;dr: I’m having a hard time convincing myself that any of the top animal welfare charities are really as effective as I want them to be, and I’m seeking feedback on my thought process as I figure out where to donate in my first time.
I’ve been interested in effective altruism for years, and I’m finally in a place where I can start donating considerable sums of money. I’m interested in both global health & development and animal welfare. I’m not interested in longtermism. That’s a long topic for another day. While I feel like I understand global health & development pretty well and I’ve made up my mind to donate to Givewell’s Top Charities fund, I have a lot of open questions about animal welfare, and I’d like some help in thinking through these topics. In this post, I will explain where I currently am in my thought process on donating to animal welfare. I invite you to critique my thought process, help me develop it or show me where I’m wrong.
When I started reading about animal charity evaluations, I was struck by how different it was from global health & development. There’s no longer RCTs and high-quality studies, no longer organizations with a long, proven track record. There’s usually no clear estimate of how many animals are impacted, and where there is, the figure is speculative. The causal effect of all interventions is unclear. Given all this uncertainty, I’ve become more skeptical or donating to this cause as a whole, and especially in giving to funds such as the Animal Welfare fund and the one by Animal Charity Evaluators. Quite frankly, I’m unconvinced that many of the charities that are given grants by these funds are very effective, and I’m not even fully convinced that any of the charities are effective. Let’s go into the list of charities recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators and analyze. The reason I want to focus on Animal Charity Evaluators rather than the EA Animal Welfare Fund is that it seems less risk taking, and more about established charities, and that’s what I’m looking for.
Corporate Outreach
Biggest category of charities. Includes: Programs by The Humane League, Aquatic Life Institute, Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği, Shrimp Welfare Project, Sinergia Animal.
My biggest gripe with corporate outreach is that the animal charities only play a small role in companies reducing animal suffering. You see, in order for a company to make a pledge to transition to, say, cage-free hens, you first want the company to want to do so. That requires will from the investors, consumers, and industry peers. The amount of influence that the charities can have on the will is pretty small. My partner works in sustainability consulting, and she explained to me that in the similar world of climate pledges, that’s how it works. Nonprofits don’t have a lot of influence because the companies have no incentive to listen to them. So for a pledge to stop caging chickens to happen, you first need preexisting will, and that’s the hardest part. I don’t take the claims that the charities are responsible for the pledges seriously.
The next step would be making a plan to transition out of the cruel practices. Charities help companies during this process. That’s nice and all, but I’m sure that if the companies have made up their minds to make this change, they can figure out how to do it. I don’t think the added value here is very large.
The last step is oversight that the pledges are actually being fulfilled. Here, again, I just don’t know how much added value the charities bring. Companies have much more power and data to oversee themselves than the charities have, and if they break their pledges, there’s a risk of bad PR regardless.
To summarize, charities that work on corporate outreach only play a small part in the transition to less cruel farming methods.
Now, to the numbers, looking at THL since they’re largest and oldest in the area:
THL estimates that their global corporate accountability work spared more than 3.4 million hens from cages in 2024
2022 revenue: $17,807,227
Okay so the data is slightly misaligned, and THL does do other stuff, but there’s so much uncertainty on impact here, we shouldn’t pretend we are doing anything more accurate than ballpark estimates. This gives us a ballpark estimate of $5 per hen spared from a cage. But given the fact that they only play a small part in this kind of progress happening, let’s say 10%, the ballpark estimate becomes $50. Not so great. I’d personally rather save a kid from dying to Malaria for $5000. Maybe some people will disagree, but I think my moral weights clearly go towards the humans here.
Advocacy for Plant-based diets
Includes: Dansk Vegetarisk Forening, Good Food Fund, New Roots Institute
These organizations vary quite a lot in what they actually end up doing, but they all seem to have the same cost-effectiveness issues.
Let’s look at the recent achievements section for Good Food Fund, for example:
GFF has served as a hub for stakeholders in China’s food systems and is arguably the best-known brand in the country’s food systems space today.
Through their annual summit, Mama’s Kitchen program, and other initiatives, GFF has built momentum and social capital for transitioning to plant-based diets in China.
As a pioneer in food systems work in China, GFF created the Good Food Pledge to promote plant-based dietary transition and animal welfare.
This all seems terribly vague to me. They get all these people that are already interested in this cause to come together and talk, but what does that actually achieve? I’ve been to enough conferences in my life to seriously doubt how much concrete action they contribute to. I don’t think a bunch of activists talking to each other really achieves much.
Let’s look at the New Roots Institute, they’re quite different:
New Roots Institute’s classroom surveys conducted at schools they engaged with over the past year show that approximately 80% of students plan to reduce their consumption of animal products. Additionally, over 90% of students support introducing more plant-based options in their schools and favor legislation aimed at reducing factory farming.
They have trained student fellows to lead campaigns in 36 states and 20 countries, leading to commitments to plant-based dining at UCLA and Cornell University.
That’s awesome, honestly. Changing people’s minds is the core of what is necessary for a transition to plant-based food. If we can do this cost-effectively, I’m on board. But let’s look at the numbers. Under “Ran fellowships to facilitate students to become effective advocates”, the Number of individuals reached per $100,000 is: 1,264. Under “Gave lessons on factory farming at high schools and colleges” this number is 5,963
That’s a ballpark estimate of one advocate per $100, and one kid engaged per $20. Not great. Once again, I’d rather save kids from Malaria for $5,000.
The Rest
Faunalytics
I think Faunalytics is interesting, and I have read some of their research, but it’s just not actionable enough for me. Are some research reports here and there the thing that will bring us change for animals? I’d rather donate to a charity that actually runs an intervention.
Legal Impact for Chickens
I find this one to be quite interesting. Their funding is small, but they’ve brought a significant number of lawsuits. However, I’m still not convinced enough. Their biggest lawsuit, the Costco one, got dismissed, and nothing came out of it. None of the smaller ones has a clear cut story of thing changing. Companies can always keep skirting animal cruelty laws, and plenty of abuse happens within what is considered lawful behavior.
Wild Animals Initiative
I wrote so many words on how I’m concerned about the speculativeness of lots of animal charity work, and this is the most speculative of them all. Don’t get me wrong, my mind is open on wild animal welfare, but I think there are lots of serious questions to answer, but philosophical and practical, before I can be convinced that donating to wild animal welfare is the most effective thing.
I you can try and convince me that these charities, or any of them specifically, are especially effective, please do so.
Welcome to the EA forum and the EA world! And thank you for considering giving to effective charities. And no less importantly, thank you for being transparent about your donation decision reasoning, it is really admirable.
I weak upvoted your post and voted disagree (X), and I am going to explain why I disagree, and I hope I am communicating in an inviting and constructive way.
I think your impression is quite far from the truth at least when it comes to the cage-free egg movement. A short summary is that the whole global trend of cage-free shift/pledges is virtually entirely due to the work of animal charities and advocates. The short explanation of how they did so was that they used the combination of friendly outreach (called the “good cop strategy”) and threatening actions (called the “bad cop strategy”) to both try to lure companies to pledge, and when they don’t do so, use threatening actions to incur costs to companies that don’t pledge. Too much details about the bad cop actions is both hard to read, and might incur some strategic risks so I won’t go into them here. But the short story is that bad cop strategies do increase at least the perceived costs (by their public relations departments or top management), sometimes actual costs, of companies.
Also, in case you wonder, good cop strategies are there for a reason too. First, “giving someone a chance” before threatening actions is likely seen as a more civilsed strategy. Second, you might be surprised how many companies would just pldege after the friendly outrech. (a true story: the sourcing manager of a mid-sized company were themselves shocked by how horrific the battery cages of their egg suppliers were, and tried to convince their company to pledge, and they did)
So you are right that for a change to happen, we need the companies to want to do so, but animal charities don’t just aim at companies that already want to change, or wait for companies to suddenly want to do so. They first try to be friendly, if it doesn’t work, they try to force something out.
I think you are heavily underestimating the impact of effective animal charities. Estimates of the effectiveness of cage-free egg campaigns are typically like “38 to 250 hens spared per dollar” or “Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar” (instead of $per hen spared). But let’s set even that aside, I wonder if you can share a bit more about your reasoning here.
Let’s set aside the issue that the year don’t match. I think first, it’s wrong to take the whole revenue (or expense for that matter) as a divider as THL also spend their money on other programs, such as regranting, movement building, education etc.
But more importantly, if you want to apply a 0.1 discount multiplier to their impact per dollar, you are essentially applying it to their claimed number of hens spared. But your reason for doing so was that you believe only ~10% of this change was actually due to THL. But it seems to me in their language they are trying to state the impact due to their work. So even if you believe that charities like THL played a small part in the corporate decisions to go cage free (which I disagree), you don’t need to discount if they are only reporting impact that they believe to have been caused by their work. So is your reason for discounting stemming from a belief that they (gravely) over-reported their impact?
Re-the impact of groups on corporations. I wrote a piece on this here.
I do think some companies are acting based on being more aligned such as high-end brands like Waitrose in the UK. Even in these cases, it can be a kind of getting things over the line scenario, where talking to them is the small nudge that results in counterfactual changes.
But as FAI mentions the cost of “bad cop” actions to companies seems significant. If you’re looking for RCT-level evidence of this unfortunately we don’t have it. This mostly looks at case studies, broadly how companies value their reputations and how comparable corporate scandals affect market evaluation and performance. I’d be interested to see this replicated specifically for cage-free. Taking historic or upcoming campaigns by working with groups for intel and tracking their effect on companies.
I think attribution is broadly a fair concern though and could affect many interventions outside of anything you are directly paying for e.g. any lobbying-based interventions would have the same concern regardless of cause area.
Love this post, I think animal welfare could benefit significantly, both from an impact perspective and in developing their funding streams by putting more effort in Measure, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) and the mission motor is working on this. I’m not sure what their funding situation is like, but it might be an area that appeals to you.
Also, up front I work at THL.
I think what you are getting at here—the “professionalism” of the global health & development space vs that of the animal space, was a significant factor for me to work in the animal space rather than in the climate space, where I was currently working. It seemed work on factory farming was so neglected and with more focus and attention, significant change could be made here.
When it comes to corporate outreach work on cage-free and broilers my experience has been different to what your partner and I experienced in the climate space. I think this stems from the climate space being much more developed and it being a very ‘standard’ thing executives need to work on. Farm animal welfare for the most part has not been on these companies radars and the organisations doing corporate work have driven this change. For many of the companies Open Wing Alliance members work with, cage-free is often the first animal welfare policy a company ever makes and subsequent change for animals has then been easier to advocate for and in some cases has often then come from the company themself, ie Carrefour making a quail cage-free egg policy.
With fulfilment work, my personal experience has shown that attention on the fulfilment of the commitments is definitely needed and we would not be seeing the high fulfilment rates we see in this report without this happening.
From what I can tell the main crux here is how much the change is driven by a company and their associates vs a charity. My perspective from the inside is that there are genuinely people in these companies that care about the work we are doing, but these companies have a lot of things on their priority list and keeping animal welfare at the top of it is a task that requires a lot of effort from charities. I’m not sure how might align on that difference?
Note on the THL numbers, the reported 3.4M is the number of hen spaces that we estimate a company no longer has in cages in 2024 between their previous reported numbers. This differs from Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar where I believe it is also making an estimate of how long would it take for a company to make these changes without these campaigns “Mean years of impact”. Which I think can also give some insight into the role charities play in bringing about this change.
Thanks for shining the spotlight on MEL and animal welfare charities.
I enjoyed this post (upvoted, but disagree-voted). I think skepticism about animal charities is well-placed for the reasons you outlined—we don’t really have robust evidence. But I wanted to quickly comment on your description of corporate outreach. I won’t go into details, especially because people like Fai provided more elaborate answers, but I want to provide some anecdata to counter your partner’s one.
As a person who have seen corporate work from animal advocacy from inside for the last 10 years. I can tell you just a different tactic can produce outsized difference. In Poland, we have tried different tactics—trained by The Humane League—and in a few months we had enormous wins from the biggest national players. I also saw Open Wing Alliance training groups and after just few weeks of such training they were delivering wins when before that they were stuck sometimes for years. I think the counterfactual impact of groups like The Humane League was vast.
I think it’s good to think about corporate work as a coordination problem with multiple agents having their own goals and incentives, especially big companies, so how it works is not as straightforward as you described.
This is not to say that any corporate outreach work is tractable or that you should donate to animal charities. There are other conditions that need to be fulfilled for things to work, etc. But my main point is that we should not simplify or downplay these changes, at least in cage-free cause area.
I decided to move my reply to GeorgeBridgwater to this level of the thread, since I think the reply thread I created there deserves to be on its own and not be crowded out and sidetracked so heavily. But I do find this comment to be somewhat important so I reposted it here.
I want to reply to the point that attribution is fair concern. I worked directly in the animal movement before, and I have witnessed some suspected double/multiple counting of the same impact, and at least a part that is overlapping.
But here’s something important to know: Even if, say, two charities “double count” their contribution to an impact, it doesn’t mean one or both of them neccesarily have over reported their counterfactual impact. Why? Consider this toy example (long philosophical discussions):
Scenario A: Two rescue teams, one consisting of 3 rescuers and another consisting of 4, can together save 10 kids in danger. If one of the teams—in fact, one of the 7 members, don’t join, the 10 kids cannot be saved and will die.
Analysis of counterfactual impact: Since either team opting out would mean the kids would all die. So in the case of both (full) teams working together and saved 10 kids, each team’s counterfactual impact is 10 kids! In fact, if you break it down, each rescuer’s counterfactual impact is saving 10 kids (and can therefore each honestly claim that this is so)
If you are still interested, it could get more interesting here, especially for the donors.
Now consider scenario A’: Turns out that all of these rescuers each demand an expensive safety equipment in order to agree to go ahead. Each equipment costs $100. A total of $700 is required to save 10 kids.
Analysis of A’: Even though each team’s counterfactual impact by deciding to go ahead would have been saving 10 kids. A single donor donating $300 to one team and then $400 to another won’t have the counterfactual of saving 20 kids by the $700 donation! Instead, the $700 donation’s counterfactual impact is saving 10 kids.
Moral of A’: A donor could be donoting to two projects with total counterfactual impact of X+Y, while still possbily have a counterfactual impact from the donation that is smaller than X+Y. In fact, I suspect this might be happening within the cage-free movement space.
It could get even weirder, consider scenario A″: The only two donors who can donate in time, can only donate $300 and $400 respectively (let’s say it’s only possible for them to draw out these amounts in time). The $300 and $400 donations would each have the counterfactual impact of saving 10 kids. This is not just due to the fact that there are now two decision makers (donors), but also that each donor has a hard constraint that only allows them to donate $300/$400, making the another donation “neccessary” in a different sense than the $300/$400 in A’.
It could even weirder still, but it would basically become useless beyond here (if not earlier), and also useless for EA in general. So I won’t go into them.
Thanks for posting and for being open to outside perspectives!
The most obvious thing to ask is whether you’ve engaged with the previous literature on the cost-effectiveness of animal charities. For example, in October 2023, Rethink Priorities estimated that 1,132 DALYs are averted per $1,000 donated to corporate cage-free campaigns using their moral weights, and that 73 DALYs are averted per $1,000 if you assume low moral weights for chickens. They also found that shrimp stunning interventions may avert 38 DALYs per $1,000 donated to them, using their own moral weights. This compared with 19.1 DALYs averted per $1,000 donated to the Against Malaria Foundation. You can also check out their cross-cause cost-effectiveness model and play around with it.
The other question is what you mean when you say “my moral weights clearly go towards the humans here”. Does this mean that you’re solely incorporating the probability of sentience and the intensity of pleasure and suffering that each species experiences, or are you smuggling in speciesist discounts to your moral weights? Also, what would be your bar for preferring to donate to an animal charity? That should probably be worked out beforehand, otherwise the goalposts could shift.
Finally, I think each charity should be evaluated on its own merits. I don’t think The Humane League and Shrimp Welfare Project can be grouped together in the you’ve done, for instance. They do quite different things!
I understand this feeling, and I myself certainly felt that way previously.
I think the way that I reconciled this was weighing up how important neglectedness of a cause area was to me vs. certainty of impact. And I landed on neglectedness being the most important because it can facilitate and accelerate change not just for one organisation but often have second order effects for the entire cause area.
I think there is an issue cross comparing global health with animal welfare which seems really unfair. Global health and development has orders of magnitude more money but yet we compare it like for like with the animal space but that seems incorrect to me. it’s really easy to underestimate how much the lack of funding can have on the infrastructure of a space and therefore a charities ability to do good. How can they attract the best talent without funding that then drives how effective the organisation is? They often have significantly less staff in their team to do the same amount of good as a well funded charity but also just like how corporate campaign results are a combined victory, many global health and development organisation benefit massively from Givewell, 80,000 hours etc. that historically have helped them to get to the stage they are now.
So I guess my point is what is driving you to want to donate to animals in the first place? Because it might be that just the top recommended charities aren’t the right solution and it also might just help you answer comparing across very different cause areas.
For what is worth, I like the work of Good Food Institute on pushing the science and market of alternative proteins. They also do some policy work though I fear their lobbying might have orders of magnitude less strength than the industry’s.
Also, as far as I know the Shrimp Welfare Initiative is directly buying and giving away the stunners (hopefully to create some standard practice around it). So counterfactually it seems a reasonable bet for the direct impact at least.
But I resonate with the broad concerns with corporate outreach and advocacy. I am particularly wary of bad cop strategies. While I feel they may work, I easily see how companies could set up some public advertising campaign about how their work is good for farmers and the community. I see them doing it all the time, and they are way better financed than charities.
Thank you for taking the time to engage with ACE’s work and for considering animal welfare charities. Since other commenters have contributed a variety of reasons to support corporate outreach, which we agree with, we’d just like to add a few reasons why ACE’s Recommended Charities that work on plant-based advocacy are plausibly competitive on cost-effectiveness:
They have a high potential to bring about secondary impacts, such as movement building effects that can lead to improved conditions for future reforms and/or create positive feedback loops for the size/influence of the animal advocacy movement
They have a strong multiplier effect to bring in additional funding.
You might have also read elsewhere that we’re developing an evidence tracker. At some point we’ll likely share this publicly which might provide additional input in your decision making.
If you haven’t already read it, this post shows a bit more of our thinking on this topic.
If you have any more questions or uncertainties about the work of specific ACE recommended charities, please feel free to contact our development team. We’d be happy to answer your questions in more detail.
Thank you!