[This does not represent the opinion of my employer] 

I currently mostly write content for an Effective Giving Initiative, and I think it would be somewhat misleading to write that we recommend animal charities that defend animal rights -people would misconstrue what we're talking about. Avoided suffering is what we think about when explaining who "made it" to the home page, it's part of the methodology, and my estimates ultimately weigh in on that. It's also the methodology of the evaluators who do all the hard work.

My guess would be that EA has a vast majority of consequentialists, whose success criterion is wellbeing, and whose methodology is [feasible because it is] welfare-focused (e.g. animal-adjusted QALYs per dollar spent). This probably sedimented itself early and people plausibly haven't questioned it a lot so far. EA-aligned rights-focused interventions exist, but they're ultimately measured according to their gains in terms of welfare.

On my side, I think it's already hard as it is to select cost-effective charities with a consequentialist framework (and sell it to people!), and "rights" add in a lot of additional distinctions (e.g. rights as means vs as ends) which makes it hard to operationalize. I can write an article about why we recommend animal welfare charity X in terms of avoided counterfactual suffering, but I'm clueless if I had to recommend it in terms of avoided right infringement, because it's harder to measure, and I'm not even sure of what I'm talking about.

I'd be happy to see people from other positions give their opinion, this is a strictly personal view.

Re: agency of the community itself, I've been trying to get to this "pure" form of EA in my university group, and to be honest, it felt extremely hard.

-People who want to learn about EA often feel confused and suspicious until you get to object-level examples. "Ok, impactful career, but concretely, where would that get me? Can you give me an example?". I've faced real resistance when trying to stay abstract.

-It's hard to keep people's attention without talking about object-level examples, be it for teaching abstract concepts. It's even harder once you get to the "projects" phase of the year.

-People anchor hard on some specific object-level examples after that. "Oh, EA ? The malaria thing?" (Despite my go-to examples included things as diverse as shrimp welfare and pandemic preparedness)

-When it's not an object-level example, it's usually "utilitarianism" or "Peter Singer", which act a lot as thought stoppers and have an "eek" vibe for many people.

-People who care about non-typical causes actually have a hard time finding data and making estimates.

-In addition to that, agency for really making estimates is hard to build up. One member I knew thought the most Impactful career choice he had was potentially working on nuclear fusion. I suggested him to find out about the Impact-Tractability-Neglectedness of it to compare to another option he had (even rough OOMs) as well as more traditional ones. I can't remember him giving any numbers even months later. When he just mentioned he felt sure about the difference, I didn't feel comfortable arguing about the robustness of his justification. It's a tough balance to strike between respecting preferences and probing reasons.

-A lot of it comes down to career 1:1s. Completing the ~8 or so parts is already demanding. You have to provide estimates that are nowhere to be found if your center of interest is "niche" in EA. You then have to find academic and professional opportunities as well as relations that are not referenced anywhere in the EA community (I had to reach back to the big brother of a primary school friend I had lost track of to get a fusion engineer he could talk to!). If you need funding, even if your idea is promising, you need excellent communication skills for writing a convincing blog post, plausibly enough research skills to get non-air-plucked estimates for ITN / cost-effectiveness analysis, and a desire to go to EAGs and convince people who could just not care. Moreover a lot of people expressly limit themselves to their own country or continent. It's often easier to stick to the usual topics (I get call for applications for AIS fellowships almost every months, of course I never had ones about niche topics)

-Another point about career 1:1s, the initial list of options to compare is hard to negotiate. Some people will neglect non-EA options, others will neglect EA options, and I had issues with artificially adding options to help them truly compare options.

-Another other point, some people barely have the time to come to a few sessions. It's hard to get them to actually rely on the methodological tools they haven't learned about in order to compare their options during career 1:1s.

-A good way to cope with all of this is to encourage students to start things out -to create an org rather than joining one. But not everyone has the necessary motivation for this.

I'm still happy with having started the year with epistemics, rationality, ethics and meta-ethics, and to have done other sessions on intervention and policy evaluation, suffering and consciousness, and population ethics. I didn't desperately need to have sessions on GHD / Animal Welfare/ AI Safety, thought they're definitely "in demand".

[note: my donation is currently paused for financial reasons, but reflects what is written below]

Put simply, if living with a huge amount of suffering animals is maybe wrong, then living with a raising amount of suffering animals is certainly morally careless.

It's due to general trends -humans globally seem to do better and better at helping one another, with fewer and fewer children deaths overall, people seemingly concerned by the suffering of other human beings, GDP rising, etc. I expect the ball to keep rolling.

Animals, on the opposite, suffer in greater and greater amount, and we don't seem to have found a real solution to revert this trend. Animal rights advocacy might end up being a "phase" in retrospect, and this is a worrying prospect. My hope is that my donations help build up momentum to eventually reach a tipping point.