AMA: The Humane League UK - farmed animal welfare, our funding gap and match funding campaign. Ask us anything.

Thank you for your question. 

THL and THL UK are two independent organisations. 

THL (the global organisation, legally based in the US) is the primary funder of THL UK. So a donation to THL will fund THL and THL UK, as well as the Open Wing Alliance. If, therefore, someone is interested in funding work globally then a donation to THL may be most suitable. 

However, if you are a UK based donor then your gift may be eligible for Gift Aid, which can increase the value of your donation to 125%, thus maximising its impact. In this instance, we would recommend a donation directly to THL UK. 

THL UK does not just work within the boundaries of the UK, it is also responsible for many of our gains for animals across Europe. 

If you are interested in fish welfare, then we would also suggest donating to THL UK. We have brought together a coalition of NGO’s, and have industry backing our calls, as well as support across the political spectrum, as we push for the introduction of UK legislation to protect fish at the time of slaughter. 

Regardless of how a donation is directed, a donation to THL or THL UK will have an enormous impact and help to end the abuse of animals raised for food. 

This question has been answered in collaboration with THL. 

Thank you for your question.

As you’ve mentioned, we have planned our activities for this financial year. We are committed to proceeding with our plans. However, if we do not receive the funding budgeted for those activities, we would need to either scale back some of our activities or draw on our reserves. Whilst we have a healthy level of reserves currently, they are designed to protect THL UK and its activities in case of an emergency. Reducing our level of reserves would limit our ability to respond in the case of an unplanned event or emergency, and put us in a potentially difficult situation in 2024-2025 if our fundraising plans don’t go as well as we hoped for 2023-2024. Therefore, we are reliant on donations to make sure these activities can go ahead as planned, and not have a detrimental long-term impact on the organisation. 

Extra funding would be used to fund our legal case against the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). 

In May 2023 we had a High Court hearing where we challenged the legality of fast-growing breeds of chicken. Although we did not win the initial case, our appeal has been granted and we will have a further hearing in spring 2024. 

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to force the Government, with one decision from an appeals court judge, to transform one billion innocent lives per year. 

We have been able to secure a cost cap from the court, which means, if we lose the case, we are only liable to pay Defra’s legal costs up to £30k. Without this cost cap we would likely have not been able to continue with our appeal as Defra’s legal fees could be in excess of £300,000.

Regardless, £30k is still a significant sum. We will also have our other legal fees, which have been estimated at £26k (even with one of the two Barristers  working on the case being fully pro bono) meaning we will need £56k in total to fund the appeal. 

Because our appeal was granted only recently, we have not budgeted for a second court battle to happen in this financial year. In order to proceed with this second day in court, we need to raise these funds to be able to move ahead. 

Thank you for your question Andrew. 

Yes it does. That is because funding from the ACE Recommended Charities Fund and Open Philanthropy goes directly to THL (please see the answer to the question about giving to THL vs. THL UK). This is then re-granted to us in the form of a fixed annual grant from THL. This has already been confirmed for this financial year, and our current £280k shortfall sits outside this based on our own fundraising targets. 

Thank you for your question.

Because having 10x the funding we currently have is not a realistic prospect, especially in the near or mid-term future, it is difficult to say exactly how we would allocate this kind of funding.  

We can also say that with an unanticipated spike in funding, we would also be able to work on new initiatives that, at this time, we do not have the funds for. 

Expansion into corporate fish welfare work is an extremely impactful field that has the potential of positively influencing welfare changes for a large number of fish. Our core grant from THL does not cover any work for fishes, and so if we came into significant unexpected funding, this would move up on our agenda.

We also intend to use our institutional campaigning expertise to undertake corporate plant-based advocacy - asking companies to commit to increasing their plant-based offerings - at some point  in the future. As with corporate fish work, there are currently question marks around resourcing this, and unanticipated additional funding would remove those.

First and foremost, however, THL UK would allocate more resources to our existing corporate and legislative approaches if we came into large sums of unexpected funding. Our Corporate Relations and Campaigns Teams are relatively small (5 employees in total) and significant new funding would allow us to bring in extra capacity, enabling us to bring more varied, and intense, pressure to a larger number of corporate targets.  

While there are multiple approaches that have the potential to impact farmed animal welfare in meaningful ways, there are also multiple organisations working in the UK and beyond within their specific area of knowledge, skill and focus. For us, this area is securing meaningful welfare changes for animals raised for food, and thanks to our campaigning expertise, we are able to impact the lives of exponentially more animals, and reduce more suffering, by investing our energy in winning institutional campaigns.

Thank you for your question Andrew. 

Our match funders for our end of year appeal also supported our end of year appeal last year with a similar match. It was likely that these Major Donors would give again, but not certain, and certainly not expected in terms of the amount they have provided for match funding this appeal. In conversations with the Major Donors, it was clear that the match element of their donation–and the extra reach and impact that match brought into THL UK–was a large part of their reason for their gift. 

In assessing our current fundraising performance and developing a strategy for the next 3 years, one of our key focusses will be converting existing supporters into donors. We currently have a large supporter database, but a lower than average percentage who are donating to THL UK. As such, our focus for this campaign is really on utilising the match funding to, not only secure vital funds to close our funding gap, but to convert those who would not otherwise have given into donors. 

Our match funders are also not just providing funds, they are lending their voice and backing to our campaign, sharing their motivations for giving, to help influence others to support the work of THL UK and become donors or increase their giving. 

You might be interested in this link to some recent forum discussion on seafood certification.

Thank you for your question. 

Through negotiation and hard-hitting public pressure campaigns, THL UK is able to secure corporate commitments to improve animal welfare standards.  We choose not to run certification schemes because those schemes, like RSPCA Assured, usually involve having financial ties to the producers or retailers themselves (a certain percentage of sales going to the scheme administrator). Because THL UK wants to expose and hold corporations aggressively to account for poor animal welfare, being fully independent gives us the autonomy to speak critically and openly–and our approach gets results: As a result of our corporate campaigns and collaboration with other organisations, 130 UK companies (610 companies globally) have now signed up to the Better Chicken Commitment. If you would like to get an overview of the companies that made a commitment, all broiler welfare and cage-free commitments globally can be tracked via Chicken Watch, a website by THL.

We of course agree that the current labelling of meat and dairy products is unclear and often misleading. Images of idyllic animals on green farmland, or labels claiming animals live in ‘comfortable’ settings, are a far cry from the deprivation and suffering they experience on factory farms. And we hold retailers to account when we see them using these tactics–just recently, Lidl UK removed misleading imagery of free range outdoor chickens from their website after we submitted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority.