TL;DR
- When surveyed, the EA community and leaders think ~18-24% of resources should go towards animal advocacy. The actual figure is about 7%.
- We as the EA ecosystem are putting less resources (money and time) into animal advocacy than the movement thinks we should when surveyed.
- This disparity could be because of loss of message fidelity, it's a harder cause area to pitch donors, or the role of large funders, but I'm honestly not too sure.
My job at Senterra Funders involves making the case to EA/EA adjacent prospective donors that they can do a tonne of good by donating to animal advocacy charities. As part of this work I’ve noticed a certain level of inconsistency in the EA ecosystem: I encounter a lot more people who want the animal advocacy movement to 'win' than people working in or donating to the space.
The numbers
It turns out this intuition is backed up by survey data.
Sources (see Appendix for extra details):
- Meta Coordination Forum (MCF; 2024) / Talent Need Survey on ideal allocation of financial resources
- EA Community survey data from 2023 on jobs by cause area I obtained in private correspondence with David Moss.
- Historical EA funding data: 2025 update on actual EA donations by case area.
- Note: I didn’t include the 2023 supplementary materials for the EA Community Survey Cause Prioritization because there wasn’t a category on ‘meta’ which made it too confusing to include without extra work. Having said that, at a glance the numbers look fairly similar to the meta coordination forum survey.
Looking at this chart, it’s quite striking that about 2.5 times less money goes towards animal advocacy than both the community (here), and ‘EA leaders’ think should go towards this cause area.
There’s also a similar issue with where people are working. Compared to animal advocacy, there are almost 4x as many people working in x-risk, 2x in ‘meta’.
Accounting for the disparity
What’s going on here? Either these numbers are wrong, the optimal allocation of resources has changed since this post went out, or this is a big failing of allocation of resources?
Here are some speculative reasons why this might be the case:
- The funding split is dominated by Coefficient Giving. Coefficient Giving/Good Ventures makes up the majority of EA donations in 2025, so this will dominate the funding allocation. Although, the data shows 9% of CG’s funding going to farm animals in 2025, which is higher than the 7% average, so CG is actually bringing up the average substantially.
- Helping farm animals is a tougher pitch than helping humans. To the extent that a lot of EA funders are working with other funders in the broader ecosystem, it’s much easier to bring in new funders to helping the world’s poorest people than helping chickens or fish.
- The message from ‘EA leaders’ has been lost in translation. It’s safe to say that for quite a while now the vibe in EA has been that x-risk and AI are the most important problem to tackle. I respect the people who have been saying this quite a lot and don’t disagree with their assessment. I do worry that the message from some EA leaders might have looked like “AI Safety looks to be more pressing on the margin but with wide error margins and factory farming seems really important too”, and came out as “AI safety is the most pressing problem”. My evidence for this is the MCF survey, and the fact that CG is spending a far higher % on farm animal welfare than the wider movement.
I’m writing this with a genuine curiosity of what others think of the claims made. Is there a misallocation of resources here? And if so, why?
Mandatory caveats to end on:
- Different data is sliced in different ways across cause area divides. If you look at the original sources it should be clear how I combined sources.
- It’s also unclear how we should define the border of EA money and non-EA money. In order for this to not balloon out I accepted these numbers as presented.
- This is a rougher version of this post than I’d like due to time constraints, but the main information is all there.
- I am almost certainly biased because my job is fundraising for the animal advocacy ecosystem, so feel free to tell me why I’m wrong (or right).
- Views are my own not Senterra Funders.
Appendix 1. Data Sources
Meta Coordination Forum (2024) / Talent Need Survey
“What (rough) percentage of resources should the EA community devote to the following broad areas over the next five years?”
“What (rough) percentage of financial resources should the EA community devote to the following specific areas over the next five years?”
EA Community Survey: Cause Prioritization (2023)
Historical EA funding data: 2025 update
Note: my data has updated numbers from Coefficient giving and Longview Philanthropy based on this section. I didn’t include Founders Pledge as I wasn’t sure about their allocation across cause areas.
EA Survey - work by cause area
This data is from the EA Survey 2024m shared by David Moss in a private correspondence
| Cause area | Frequency | % selections | % respondents |
| AI risks | 266 | 27.1% | 42.16% |
| EA movement | 198 | 20.2% | 31.38% |
| Global health | 119 | 12.1% | 18.86% |
| Animal welfare | 115 | 11.7% | 18.23% |
| Biosecurity | 87 | 8.9% | 13.79% |
| Other | 74 | 7.6% | 11.73% |
| X-risk (other) | 72 | 7.3% | 11.41% |
| Cause prioritization | 49 | 5.0% | 7.77% |
Caveat from David: “respondents who indicated that they worked for an EA org or do EA direct work could indicated that their work involved multiple cause areas (which I think makes sense, as one might work on GCRs, including both AI and other GCRs). As such I've included both the percentage of total selections and the percentage of total respondents”
Hot take: the fact that we kill more animals per year than the total number of humans who've ever lived, and ~99% of them are factory farmed, I think animal agriculture is a moral atrocity that dwarfs all human problems (including throughout history).
Thanks for the bold take.
You may be interested in my estimates for the total welfare of animal populations which I calculated assuming individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year is proportional to "number of neurons"^"exponent". For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, which I believe are reasonable best guesses, I got an absolute value of the total welfare of cattle, hens, broilers, and farmed black soldier fly (BSF) larvae and mealworms, finfishes, and shrimps ranging from 7.65*10^-4 to 2.48 times the total welfare of humans. So I believe the total welfare of humans may easily be much larger than that of farmed animals.
Nitpick. I think you meant "kill more farmed animals", not just "kill more animals". Abraham Rowe estimated agricultural pesticides kill "100 trillion to 10 quadrillion" insects per year, around 1 quadrillion (10^15). Hannah McKay and Sagar Shah estimated humans kill 1.12 trillion (= (76.2 + 134 + 440 + 472)*10^9) farmed broilers, finfishes, shrimps, BSF larvae, and silkworms per year, only 0.112 % (= 1.12*10^12/10^15) of the insects killed by agricultural pesticides.
Thanks for posting this! My thoughts on "what's going on here?":
Perhaps there is room for more EAs to shift their giving to Animal Advocacy in response to the above, and/or more optimistically to find animal-centric messaging with as much mainstream appeal as GiveWell.
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.
Agreed completely! As a fundraiser myself, and working on raising funds for animal welfare for the past 12 years, I have seen and experienced this "decline" of the animal welfare topic within the EA movement in the recent years.
Five years ago, when you attended an EA Conference, you would see entire floors, panels, discussions and speakers from the Animal Welfare movement, divided into the different interventions, type of advocacy, activities. Today, you're lucky if you see one topic on animal welfare, one panel (usually on hot things for the EA community such as Insect farming), but no longer playing a protagonist role in the gatherings.
I understand also how many people in the movement would want to mix things. Have AI in the same conference where you have AW, and global catastrophe and future pandemics. But what happens when you do this, is that inevitably you prioritize one in detriment of the other. And now AI has taken the room completely because its just the hot thing to be discussed at the moment.
I don't want to say one is more important than the other. I'm not here for that and who am I to judge on this. But there's enough space to have dedicated discussions on all, and to incentivize funding on it all.
Perhaps is also up to us, the users and individuals within the EA movement, to point that out and to start promoting, requesting and claiming that we want animal welfare to have a more prominent role again.
Interestingly, community members' prioritisation of animal welfare appears to have been increasing in recent years. (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CKwDgZGLipchAoxtN/ea-survey-2024-cause-prioritization#Trends_in_cause_prioritization_over_time)
This is neither to agree or disagree with the observation about representation of animal welfare at EA conferences and such.
Thanks David! This is puzzling, but it might be what Elliot is pointing out. That AW is still a priority, but somehow this is not reflected on fundraising unfortunately.
Agreed, I'm always surprised by these low donations numbers.
I keep in mind that EA is one of the movements that helps animals the most in the world, especially farmed and wild animals, which are so important. This is great and much, much more better than the average.
But given that animals are so numerous and often live in terrible conditions, there still is be an important imbalance.
I see no rational reason to spend only 7% of donations on the vast majority of individuals in the world.