If you care about animals and want to alleviate their suffering, but aren’t sure exactly how, Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is an organization that may be able to help.
The California-based nonprofit puts out an annual guide to recommended animal charities, and it’s just been released. his list for this year. (Disclosure: There are ACEs (has helped fund some of Future Perfect’s work since 2020.)
Most of the top charities focus on improving conditions on factory farms, which makes sense, as they are places of suffering on a massive scale. There’s not just the death — in the U.S., factory farming kills more than 10 billion farmed animals every year — but the suffering the animals are forced to endure while they’re alive. Chickens, calves and pigs are often confined to such small spaces that they can barely move, and conditions are so dire that “ag-gag” laws exist to hide the cruelty from the public.
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When we hear about some of these conditions – such as the fact that hens are forced to produce eggs at such a rapid rate that theirThe intestine sometimes partially falls outUnder pressure – we want to stop them. But it can be hard to know which charities will actually put our dollars to good use.
ACE researches and promotes the most impactful, effective ways to help animals. team Three main criteria are used when deciding to recommend an organization:
- The charity must be “There is maximum profit potential for animals” — that is, they’re doing high-impact work and they’ve got the evidence to back it up.
- Charities must “Actively evaluate and improve their programs” — they are constantly trying to find the most effective way for the animals (which may change over time) and adjust their programming accordingly.
- Charities must have a “proven need for more funding” – they actually need more money to reach the people they know how to reach (which is not the case for every charity).
With this in mind, ACE has chosen its recommended charities for 2024:
1) Animal Synergy: Industrialized meat production is growing rapidly across Latin America and Asia, and Sinergia Animal — which was founded just six years ago in 2018 — has quickly led the fight against it. The group has investigated the conditions of countless farms, convinced dozens of food companies in the Global South to adhere to higher animal welfare standards, and worked with school cafeterias to serve more plant-based foods.
2) Aquatic Life Institute: Fish are consumed in greater quantities than other animals – an approx 1.1 to 2.2 trillion Removed from the ocean annually, an additional estimated 124 billion are farmed in what activists describe as “underwater factory farms.” The Aquatic Life Institute was formed in 2019, making it one of the first animal protection groups focused on advocacy for wild-caught and farmed fish and crustaceans. so farThe organization helped pass bans on octopus farming in Washington and California, convinced major food companies to improve the treatment of aquatic animals raised and raised for food, and improved welfare standards for major seafood certification programs, among other changes.
Vox guide to giving
The holiday season is giving. This year, Vox is exploring every element of charitable giving — from making the case for donating 10 percent of your income to recommending specific charities for specific causes, to what you can do to make a difference beyond donations. to explain You can find all the guide stories we have given here.
3) Danish Vegetarian Association: Operating in Denmark, the group makes plant-based meals more accessible by working with grocery stores, food companies, school cafeterias and more to expand their meat-free offerings. It also works to change government policy, and in recent years, it has scored two big wins: the Danish parliament and government allocated nearly $200 million to advance the country’s plant-based industry, and Denmark’s agriculture minister a “Action Plan” To help the nation become more plant-based in its food and agriculture sector.
4) Fananalytics: This is US based unprofitable It is somewhat meta in its approach to animal advocacy: it conducts and publishes independent research, mostly related to farmed animals, in an effort to make other animal advocates more influential and evidence-based.
For example, it examines Social Psychology Information How to influence public opinion about animals in a way that actually leads to behavior change. ACE notes that advocacy research is a neglected intervention, writing, “Funalytics programs support the animal advocacy movement by examining effective advocacy strategies, issue areas and strategies, and by providing advocates with a curated database of academic research summaries.”
5) Good food fund: China is home to more farmed animals than any other country – about 56 billion are alive at any given time. The Good Food Fund works to shift China’s food system toward a more plant-based approach using a variety of methods, including educating chefs about meat-free foods, training youth advocates, and organizing conferences to bring together industry, policymakers, and other stakeholders. . the problem
6) Human League: It is established in 2005 organization working in the United States, UK, and Japan. It has run successful campaigns calling on corporations to adopt higher animal welfare standards. It has worked to end the use of battery cages internationally and Improvement of condition For chickens raised for meat. It also handles grassroots legislation. Importantly, the Humane League has an evidence-driven approach, collecting and using data to guide its approach and testing new ways to improve its programs.
7) Wildlife Initiative: As my colleague Dylan Matthews has documented, this group is doing something unique: research and Advocate for ways to help wildlife. Instead of focusing on the welfare of animals in factory farms, it focuses on the welfare of free-ranging animals, from birds to raccoons to insects. it is Study Questions such as: What animal is capable of personal experience? What is their standard of living as wild? How can we help them safely and sustainably?
8) Legal implications for chickens: This group works to enforce laws against animal cruelty in the United States, filing lawsuits for farmed animals and suing companies that violate animal welfare commitments. The overall strategy is to make animal cruelty on factory farms a liability. The first case, in 2022, was dealt with Costco executives and treating the company’s chickens.
9) New Roots Institute: This organization wants to empower the youth of the United States to end factory farming, so it focuses on education Its outreach program in schools seeks to foster critical thinking and highlights the connections between factory farming, climate change and public health. Students have the option of participating in a year-long fellowship, where they are trained in organizational and leadership skills.
10) Farm Animal Protection Society: ÇHKD, an organization based in Turkey, is working to achieve three main goals: to ban cages from the country’s egg industry, to improve the welfare standards of farmed fish, and to help build the Turkish animal protection movement. Advocacy organizations for farmed animals are underfunded in general, but especially in the Middle East and Africa, so support for groups like ÇHKD — also Turkish for “Turkey Without Cages” — can go a long way.
11) Shrimp Welfare Scheme: This organization does exactly what its name suggests — it focuses on improving welfare standards for shrimp, which it sees as a neglected but tractable problem. It raises awareness, does corporate outreach and collaborates with producers and retailers. It also operates Sustainable Shrimp Farmers in India, which helps farmers improve the lives of shrimp in Indian farms.
If you donate to one of the above charities, you can be reasonably confident that your money will be used effectively to reduce animal suffering. And if you’re not sure which of them you want to donate to, you canSuggested Charitable Fund And leave it up to ACE to distribute money based on what their research says is most effective at the time.
Is it misguided to think about animals when so many people are suffering?
Americans are increasingly concerned about animal welfare.
A 2015Gallup pollfound that 62 percent of Americans say animals deserve some legal protection. Another 32 percent — nearly one-third — expressed an even stronger pro-animal stance, saying they believe animals should have the same rights as humans. In 2008, only 25 percent Voice that perspective.
It seems that as more and more Americans come to see animals as part of our moral circle, we draw imaginary boundaries around those we deem worthy of moral consideration.
Some people, however, respond to this with a “what about” quip: What about urgent humanitarian problems like poverty? Underlying this objection is usually a sense that we cannot “waste” compassion for animal suffering, because the care we give to that cause means we are less devoted to human suffering.
But as Ezra Klein wrote, ResearchYon Sue Park of Harvard and Benjamin Valentino of Dartmouth have shown that concern for human suffering and concern for animal suffering are not zero-sum—in fact, where you find one, you tend to find the other:
In one half of the study, they used general social survey data to see if people who support animal rights are more likely to support different human rights, testing whether abstract compassion is zero-sum. They then compared how strong animal treatment laws were in individual states with how strong laws were protecting people, a test of whether political activism was a zero-sum.
The answer, in both cases, is that compassion seems to breed empathy. Those who strongly favored government aid for the sick “were 80 percent more likely to support animal rights than those who strongly opposed it,” the authors wrote.write down. This finding held even after controlling for factors such as political ideology. Support for animal rights was also correlated with support for LGBT individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, unauthorized immigrants, and low-income people—although the effect size was small.
Similarly, states that have done the most to protect animal rights have also done the most to protect and expand human rights. States with stronger laws protecting LGBT residents, stronger protections against hate crimes, and inclusive policies for undocumented immigrants are more likely to have stronger protections for animals.
Why this correlation exists is up for debate, but the bottom line is that we’d better expect our society to take action on animal suffering: if it did, we’d see it taking action on human suffering as well. .
Update, December 3, 6:00 am: This story was originally published in 2019 and has been updated for 2024.
