Why I am more optimistic about the animal movement this year

Sometimes working on animal issues feels like an uphill battle, with alternative protein losing its trendy status with VCs, corporate campaigns hitting blocks in enforcement and veganism being stuck at the same percentage it's been for decades. However, despite these things I personally am more optimistic about the animal movement than I have ever been (despite following the movement for 10+ years). What gives?

At AIM we think a lot about the ingredients of a good charity (talent, funding and idea) and more and more recently I have been thinking about the ingredients of a good movement or ecosystem that I think has a couple of extra ingredients (culture and infrastructure). I think on approximately four-fifths of these prerequisites the animal movement is at all-time highs. And like betting on a charity before it launches, I am far more confident that a movement that has these ingredients will lead to long-term impact than I am relying on, e.g., plant-based proteins trending for climate reasons.

Culture The culture of the animal movement in the past has been up and down. It has always been full of highly dedicated people in a way that is rare across other movements, but it also had infighting, ideological purity and a high level of day-to-day drama. Overall this made me a bit cautious about recommending it as a place to spend time even when someone was sold on ending factory farming. But over the last few years professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot. This was perhaps best embodied by my favorite opening talk at a conference ever (AVA 2025) where Wayne and Lewis, leaders with very different historical approaches to helping animals, were able to share lessons, have a friendly debate and drive home the message of how similar our goals really are. This would have been nearly unthinkable decades ago (and in fact resulted in shouting matches when it was attempted). But the culture is different now. I see animal funders, activists and leaders from across the approach spectrum of strategies collaborating and respecting each other in true, deep and meaningful ways.

Infrastructure The other ecosystem-unique ingredient that has been improved massively in the last approximately five years is the cross-cutting ecosystems. The conference where this talk happened did not exist years ago. The animal movement has a career advisory organization, charity evaluator, effective giving organizations, externally evaluated funds, funder networks and events ecosystem that are very well run (and I am typically pretty critical of meta organizations and have been more skeptical of these in the past). It has coordinated email lists between dozens of organizations that work on the same topic, and surprisingly introspective research on itself and where its resources are going. None of this leads directly to an animal being solved, but it really sets the foundation for the movement building the ability to make change. It's not that there are no gaps, but per size I think our infrastructure is strong and well-spread and almost none of it existed 10 years ago.

Talent, funding and ideas The three aspects that make a good charity are talent, funding and ideas. The easiest to measure of these on a movement level is funding. Funding has been growing substantially in the farmed animal movement. Although exact trends are hard to tell, funding focused on farmed animals was in the low tens of millions and it's now safely in the low hundreds of millions a year of donations. These donations have also gotten more effectiveness-focused over time with both new funders being focused on impact per dollar, but also the funding community as a whole learning and developing. Talent is harder to measure; the movement is probably bigger overall and more organized into full-time NGO roles compared to the volunteer days of the past. My guess is the movement has at least twice as many and maybe a lot more than that full-time workers in it now compared to 10 years ago. Ideas is one area the movement might have flatlined in. I think the professionalization and rapid expansion of promising programs like cage-free has likely resulted in a little less innovation than is ideal. We have expanded our circles really well, including bugs, fish and shrimp in a deeper way than before, and there have been a few really innovative ideas in policy and international growth of the movement, but ideas might very well be the bottleneck for the animal movement in the future. I think this is something the animal movement will be better and better placed to do over time, as if you have impact-minded funders and new talent coming in, you have the tools in place to come to the new "cage-free" equivalent idea.

In conclusion I am generally a bit of a skeptic about movements (e.g., I think the EA movement has moved in the opposite direction and might write about that soon). But as a long-time member and observer of the animal movement, I feel really optimistic about our trajectory and ability to make the changes we want to see in the world long-term.

P.S. I write most of my posts, like this one on theories of change for the animal movement, on my Substack.