The best charities to help animals

If you care about animals and want to reduce their suffering, but you are not sure exactly how, Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is an organization that may be able to help. The California-based nonprofit publishes an annual guide to recommended animal charities and has just released its list for this year. (Disclosure: ACE helped fund part of Future Perfect’s work in 2020 and 2021)

Two of the first three charities focus on improving conditions on factory farms – which makes sense given that they are places of suffering on a huge scale. Not only does death occur there – in the United States alone, factory farming kills about 10 billion land animals each year – but also the suffering that animals are forced to endure while alive. Chickens, calves and pigs are often confined in spaces so small that they can barely move, and conditions are so disgusting that there are ag-gag laws to hide cruelty from the public.

When we hear about some of these conditions – such as the fact that chickens are forced to produce eggs at such a rapid rate that their intestines are sometimes partially depressed – we may want to stop them. But it can be difficult to know which charities will actually make good use of our dollars.

ACE researches and promotes the most effective ways to support animals. The group uses three main criteria when deciding whether to recommend an organization, as my colleague Kelsey Piper explained earlier:

• Charities must be “likely to make the biggest profits for animals” – that is, they work with great impact and have evidence to support it.
• Charities need to “actively evaluate and improve their programs” – they are constantly trying to figure out the most effective way to advocate for animals (which can change over time) and adjust their programming accordingly.
• Charities need to ‘have a proven need for more funding’ – they actually need more money on hand to reach anyone they know how to reach (which is not the case for any charity).

With this in mind, ACE has selected its three best charities for 2021:

1) Faunistics: This US-based non-profit organization is little of a target in its approach to animal advocacy: it conducts and publishes independent research, primarily on farm animals, in an attempt to make other animal advocates more influential and evidence-based.

For example, he examines data from social psychology on 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: “Faunalytics programs support the animal advocacy movement by exploring effective advocacy strategies, problem areas, and tactics, and by providing advocates with a select database of academic summaries. research.

2) The Humane League: Founded in 2005, this organization currently operates in the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Japan. He has run successful campaigns, urging corporations to adopt higher standards of animal welfare. It is working to end the use of battery cages internationally and to improve conditions for chickens raised for meat. He also conducts legal advocacy at the local level. Importantly, The Humane League has an evidence-based view, collects and uses data to guide its approach, and tests new ways to improve its programs.

3) Wildlife Initiative: As my colleague Dylan Matthews documents, this group is doing something unique: researching and advocating ways to help wildlife. Instead of focusing on animal welfare on factory farms, it focuses on the welfare of free-range animals from birds to raccoons to insects. He studies questions such as: Which animals are capable of subjective experiences? What is their quality of life in the wild? How can we help them safely and sustainably?

ACE also pointed to some outstanding charities – organizations that say they do a good job even though they are not in the top three – such as xiaobuVEGAN, a Chinese organization that aims to reduce the suffering of farm animals and increase the availability of animal-free products in China, and the Federation of Indian Animal Welfare Organizations, which pursues similar goals in India. It is good to single out such groups that are not based in the United States, given that, as Mark Gunther explained in Vox, the majority of farm animals are outside the United States and the EU.

If you donate to any of the charities above, you can be confident enough that your money will be used effectively to minimize animal suffering. And if you’re not sure which one you’d like to donate to, you can give the charity a recommendation and let ACE distribute the money based on what their research suggests is most effective right now.

Is it wrong to worry about animals when so many people are suffering?

Americans are increasingly concerned about animal welfare. The incredibly rapid adoption of plant-based meat products such as Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat is due in part to the growing sense that we can and should cause much less animal suffering.

A 2015 Gallup survey found that 62% of Americans say animals deserve some legal protection. Another 32 percent – almost a third – expressed an even stronger position on animals, saying they believed animals should have the same rights as humans. In 2008, only 25 percent expressed this opinion.

It seems that more and more Americans are coming to see animals as part of our moral circle, the imaginary boundary we draw around those we consider worthy of ethical consideration.

However, some people react to this with a fit of “what for what”: What about urgent human problems such as pandemics and poverty? At the heart of this objection is usually the feeling that we cannot afford to “waste” compassion for the suffering of animals, because every part of the care we devote to this cause means that we have less to devote to human suffering.

But as Ezra Klein writes, research from Harvard’s Yon Soo Park and Dartmouth’s Benjamin Valentino show that concern for human suffering and concern for animal suffering is not zero – in fact, when you find one, you tend to find the other:

In one half of the study, they used data from the General Social Survey to see if people who support animal rights are more likely to support different human rights, a test of whether abstract compassion is zero. They then compare how strong animal treatment laws are in individual countries with how strong laws protect people, a test of whether political activism is zero.

The answer in both cases is that compassion seems to engender compassion. People who strongly support government aid for the sick “were more than 80 percent more likely to support animal rights than those who strongly opposed it,” the authors write. The finding persists even after controlling factors such as political ideology. Support for animal rights has also been linked – albeit to a lesser extent – to support for LGBT people, racial and ethnic minorities, unauthorized immigrants and low-income people.

In the same way, the countries that have done the most to protect animal rights have also done the most to protect and promote human rights. Countries with strong laws protecting LGBT people, strong protection against hate crime and inclusive policies for illegal immigrants are much more likely to have strong protection for animals.

The question of why these correlations exist is a matter of debate, but most importantly, it is better to hope that our society will take action against animal suffering: if it does, we are more likely to see it take action and against human suffering.