Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) runs two main programs. Our Charity Evaluations program evaluates animal advocacy organizations to identify those that can help animals the most with additional donations. Our Movement Grants program provides funding to promising projects to scale up the animal advocacy movement. We raise funds for those projects and the charities we recommend.
Through this work (including here on the Forum), we’ve encountered a few recurring questions and concerns around prioritizing animal advocacy among some prospective donors and the EA community. This post aims to address some of these by highlighting our main reasons for why donors and grantmakers should consider funding animal advocacy charities. Feedback is very welcome!
1. Animal Suffering Is Large In Scale and Severity
Some people believe that even if most farmed animals are sentient, their capacity to suffer or experience pleasure is trivial compared to humans. Measuring suffering is difficult in all species, including human beings, but we can rely on established indicators of positive and negative experiences as a good baseline. This includes physical indicators (such as heart rate, temperature, and levels of various hormones) and behavioral indicators (such as vocalizations, attraction or aversion to certain stimuli, and demonstration of positive behaviors like playing). We can also look at the evolutionary rationale: would feeling pleasure or pain in certain contexts help this species to survive and pass on their genes?
We’ve found Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range estimates very helpful for distilling this kind of evidence and presenting it in an accessible way. One of their key takeaways is that they believe the welfare ranges of humans and the vertebrate animals they investigated are within an order of magnitude of one another. For example, if a human’s welfare range is 1.00, they estimate that a pig’s is around 0.5. This work is highly uncertain and subject to many caveats, but we think it provides a useful baseline.
While these estimates suggest lower welfare ranges for fish and invertebrates, those are also some of the animal groups for which we have the least evidence and understanding. Limited existing evidence for a species’ capacity for suffering should not be mistaken as evidence of limited capacity for suffering. We would expect new evidence to suggest higher welfare ranges and likelihood of sentience than are currently assumed. This aligns with historical trends: there is now greater scientific recognition of the likely sentience of fish and crustaceans than there was several decades ago, and insect sentience is also beginning to be taken seriously.
The sheer scale of suffering, in both numbers and suffering-adjusted days (SADs), also makes this a key problem to resolve. The Welfare Footprint Project quantifies the experiences of animals in farming systems. They evaluate the intensity, duration, and frequency of pain, discomfort, and other welfare factors, enabling prioritization of reforms based on their potential to alleviate animal suffering. This evidence-based approach helps individuals, organizations, and policymakers allocate resources toward high-impact welfare improvements, fostering more humane farming practices globally.
2. Farmed Animal Suffering Is Projected To Increase
Factory farming is almost certain to expand, intensive animal agriculture will continue advancing, and the consumption of chickens and fishes—often raised in high-density farming systems—is set to rise. To effectively mitigate animal suffering on a large scale, we must prioritize funding high-impact, proactive interventions that shift consumer behavior, push for stronger welfare policies, and accelerate the adoption of ethical and sustainable plant-based food alternatives. For more information on this topic, please read “The default trajectory for animal welfare means vastly more suffering” by James Özden.
3. Animal Welfare Gets Very Little Funding
Despite the vast scale and intensity of suffering experienced by farmed animals, their plight remains highly neglected in philanthropy and the public eye. Relatedly, the charities helping these animals receive little attention or funding compared to other causes.
Looking at data from recent years, it becomes starkly clear how overlooked farmed animals are. About 95% of donations to animal charities in the U.S. go to companion animal organizations, 2% go to laboratory animal organizations, and just 3% go specifically to farmed animal organizations. For more details on the data we used, please see this spreadsheet.
Philanthropic funding for the farmed animal welfare movement is approximately $290 million annually, which is significantly smaller compared to other causes. By contrast, the climate movement receives around $10.3 billion, and global development efforts are supported with $11 billion in annual funding (read more in this post).
Animal advocacy receives a very small proportion of EA funding compared to human-focused cause areas. In 2023, animal welfare received around 5.5% of EA funding, compared to 70.4% for Global Health and Development, 16.1% for Long-Term and Catastrophic Risk Prevention, and 7.9% for EA Infrastructure. While it’s hard to see how this compares to non-EA funding given a lack of data, 5.5% doesn’t seem like a notably high proportion. For example, in 2022, over a quarter of the U.K. population reported making a donation to animal causes.
4. Animal Welfare Has Many Promising Funding Opportunities
Some people believe corporate campaigns are currently the only provenly effective animal advocacy intervention, and these are already facing diminishing returns or will do so in the near future. While corporate campaigns appear to have been highly cost-effective in improving the lives of billions of animals, there are also many other interventions besides corporate campaigns that seem likely to be highly effective, even if their impact is harder to quantify. For example, based on our 2024 charity evaluations, Aquatic Life Institute’s policy and certifier outreach work, Dansk Vegetarisk Forening’s government lobbying work, and Sinergia Animal’s plant-based school outreach all appear to be highly effective programs that could benefit from significant increases in funding. There are also many relatively novel and hits-based projects that could be extremely impactful: this list of proposed ‘megaprojects’ provides dozens of promising ideas and you’ll find more examples of smaller size among the projects funded by the Animal Welfare Fund and the Movement Grants Fund.
At the same time, given the complexity and uncertainty of the animal advocacy space, we need to see continued evidence-gathering and movement-building to uncover further tractable funding opportunities. For example, we’re excited about Faunalytics’ work to make animal advocacy research accessible and actionable to a broad audience. Similarly, we’re also excited about Wild Animal Initiative’s work to identify tractable, low-risk interventions to help wild animals.
It’s unclear at what rate current corporate welfare outreach tactics would see diminishing returns to success (or are already doing so). It seems likely that this would happen at some point as, for example, the number of companies willing to engage with advocates decreases. There’s still a lot of exploring to do. However, the next six years might be uniquely critical for their success, as many companies have the opportunity to renege on the commitments that are coming due. Robust lobbying to ensure that companies uphold their pledges is likely to be hugely beneficial for the animals in their supply chains and set a much-needed precedent for future corporate outreach. There’s also a lot more exploratory work needed to identify the contexts in which corporate welfare campaigns can be expanded to new geographies and markets while maintaining a similar level of cost-effectiveness.
While we think that cost-effectiveness estimates should be interpreted with considerable caution, it also appears feasible that, given the huge number of animals affected, current corporate outreach campaigns could remain competitive with global health and development work even if their cost-effectiveness decreased by an order of magnitude. It’s also worth noting that, based on their own tools, Rethink Priorities concluded that good animal welfare projects tend to be more cost-effective than good global health and development projects and that this remains the case over a very wide range of moral weights that you might assign to animals.
There is still significant room for more funding both for ACE’s Recommended Charities and the animal welfare movement as a whole. Our 11 Recommended Charities alone have a combined funding capacity of around $50 million, including room for $14 million in funding beyond their current funding projections.
5. Farmed Animal Welfare Has Positive Flow-Through Effects
The ultimate goal of most farmed animal advocacy charities is to transition to a predominantly plant-based food system. This is the case for most of our Recommended Charities, including those currently focused on welfare reform. This work likely has positive ripple effects. There is a body of evidence on the positive effects that such a transition would bring for human health, food security, and climate change.
For example:
- Animal agriculture accounts for 80% of the world’s agricultural land and over 50% of the GHG emissions from food production despite providing only 17% of the world’s calories and 38% of its protein.
- People on plant-based diets are responsible for 75% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and 54% less water use than meat-eaters. In this vein, Giving Green recommends donating to Good Food Institute (a former ACE Recommended Charity) as a highly cost-effective way to help address climate change.
- The last pandemic before COVID was swine flu, which started in a pig farm and killed up to 575,000 people.
- A recent report by Bryant Research estimated that factory farming costs U.K. taxpayers over £1.2 billion each year.
These seem like significant spillover effects. Ending factory farming wouldn’t end food insecurity, global heating, or zoonotic diseases, but it could make solving them significantly easier. There are other more speculative yet plausible arguments that promoting anti-speciesist values could help to advance human empowerment. For example, evident speciesist biases in human output and behavior could set a bad precedent for certain AI alignment strategies.
There are notable caveats to the positive flow-through effects of human-focused work. One clear example is that economic development tends to correlate with higher levels of animal product consumption. Work to lift humans out of poverty is therefore likely to contribute to a significant increase in the suffering of farmed animals, at least in the short term, thereby offsetting some of the more positive ripple effects.
Evaluating Animal Charities and Their Effectiveness
There has been some debate amongst the EA community about relying solely on Cost Effective Analysis as a tool to measure impact (like organizations like GiveWell do). ACE acknowledges that the scale, diversity, and age of the animal protection movement pose unique challenges to relying solely on CEAs. Unlike organizations in Global Health and Development—where interventions are often singular, short-term, and supported by robust evidence—animal advocacy relies heavily on diverse, large-scale behavior change initiatives. These often lack sufficient data for straightforward quantification. For instance, corporate outreach programs aimed at improving animal welfare face uncertainties regarding factors like the counterfactual impact of campaigns or companies' supply chain commitments.
In response to these complexities, ACE incorporates CEAs alongside other tools to ensure a holistic evaluation of effectiveness. This includes assessing a charity's Theory of Change, which maps out how their activities lead to meaningful, long-term impact, as well as the organization’s overall health and capacity to absorb additional funding. ACE's evaluations prioritize actions that deliver sustained effects for animals that are significant in scope—both in the short and long term—while maintaining confidence in a charity’s ability to execute its mission effectively.
Given the continued high room for funding within animal advocacy and the need for growth across multiple interventions, ACE’s balanced evaluation model provides donors with confidence that their contributions will drive real change. By considering both quantifiable and qualitative measures, ACE identifies the most promising opportunities to address the widespread suffering of animals—so that we take the clearest path to impact for as many animals as possible.
Recommended Charity Fund
In case this post has inspired you to give, ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund is an excellent funding opportunity for the animal welfare movement. With a single donation, you can support a group of impactful organizations that work in ways most likely to produce the greatest gains for animals, actively evaluate and improve their programs, and have a demonstrated need for more funding. Funding is distributed biannually, in February and August, based on where it will have the most impact for animals. The Recommended Charity Fund complements grants made to projects by our Movement Grants program and the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund, supporting high-impact charities. We hope you will give today to help reduce the suffering of the most neglected species—those farmed for food and living in the wild.
We’d love to hear from you! If you have any questions or feedback about this post, our Recommended Charities, or our work more broadly, please comment below or contact us here.
Please note that we’re posting this just before many of our team members celebrate the upcoming winter holidays and enjoy our wellness week, where we close our virtual office the first week of January. Because of this, you might not see a substantial response to comments until mid-January.
Please find more information on animal suffering below:
Farmed animal suffering
Trillions of farmed animals (including fishes) experience cruel treatment and brutal deaths on factory farms. Farmed animal advocacy presents one of the most significant opportunities to reduce animal suffering on a large scale.
Chickens
Chickens are among the most abundant farmed animals, outranked only by farmed fishes and certain invertebrates, with an estimated 75 billion killed annually. When given enough space and an appropriate environment, chickens will forage for food, form nests and roosts, preen their feathers, and socialize with their flock. In contrast, chickens on factory farms live their entire lives in cramped, barren battery cages or crowded together in a shed with thousands of others, with little to no room to turn around or stretch their wings.
Fishes
As detailed in our Farmed Fish Welfare Report, existing research on fish welfare is limited, and the research that has been done tends to focus more on maximizing benefits for farms rather than fishes. While we believe that more research into promising ways to help farmed fish species is needed, we still believe that fish welfare should be prioritized within the broader effective animal advocacy movement. This is due to the current neglectedness of farmed fish animal welfare, the viability of potential strategies to improve farmed fish welfare, and the immense scale of fish farming—roughly 124 billion fishes are farmed in the world annually, with an additional 1.56 trillion caught (mid point) in the wild each year, not including bycatch and discards.
Shrimps
It is estimated that up to 518 billion (upper bound) farmed crustaceans are killed for food each year worldwide, yet less than 1% of animal welfare funding helps them. Unlike other invertebrates, it is more widely accepted that decapod crustaceans (e.g., shrimp, crabs, lobsters) and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus, squid) are sentient creatures. In 2022, the sentience of both animal groups was officially recognized in U.K. law—an extremely promising development for organizations working to improve welfare conditions in aquatic animal farms. However, there is still significant room for more funding in this highly neglected area.
Pigs
Pigs are highly sentient animals capable of experiencing complex emotions, yet they are subjected to severe welfare issues, including confinement, tail mutilations, and the inability to exhibit natural behaviors such as playing and socializing. With nearly 1.5 billion pigs slaughtered for meat each year worldwide, addressing their welfare is both impactful and viable, given the availability of practical strategies to alleviate suffering and the current neglect of this issue.
Cows
Life for farmed cows is far from the idyllic, green pastures we see on milk cartons and meat packaging. Many of these curious animals spend their days in a crowded, confined space, with little chance to roam or enjoy a quiet rest under shady trees. Like humans, mother cows must give birth to produce milk. On farms, they are artificially inseminated every single year to become pregnant. In most cases, mother cows are separated from their calves after giving birth, denying them the chance to bond and nurture their young—a deeply distressing experience for both mothers and calves. Male calves are deemed "no use" by the dairy industry, so they are sold off for veal or beef or sometimes killed immediately after birth. It is estimated that around 308 million cows are killed for food each year worldwide.
Wild animal suffering
The number of wild animals far exceeds the combined number of humans, farmed animals, companion animals, and animals in laboratories. Unfortunately, many wild animals—possibly the vast majority—live very short lives and experience painful deaths.
Most organizations that focus on wild animals seem to be concerned with biodiversity conservation rather than the welfare of individual wild animals. We know of only a handful of charities that primarily focus on improving wild animal welfare. Their total global funding is estimated to be less than $5 million per year—a tiny amount relative to other cause areas; e.g., $290 million goes toward farmed animal welfare each year. We hope to see more charities working to improve wild animal welfare in the near future.
The lack of evidence for the effectiveness of strategies to improve wild animal welfare is partially due to the complexity of natural ecosystems and the difficulty of measuring the impacts of interventions in the wild. Due to this limitation, we believe that: (i) research is a promising way to help wild animals because it can inform decisions about which strategies to pursue. We acknowledge that improving wild animal welfare involves a high level of uncertainty, but its potential positive impact is also high.