Effective Animal Advocacy Resources

By saulius @ 2019-10-24T10:41 (+118)

This article contains a list of research organizations, newsletters, research libraries, personal blogs, conferences, podcasts, funds, notable written works and other links associated with Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) movement. The list is biased because I only included resources that I know of. If you think something is missing, please comment.

Introductory materials

• Animal Welfare (article from effectivealtruism.org)
• Plant and cell based meat (6 min TED talk)
• Farm Animal Funders briefings (targeted at big funders)

Research organizations

Here is a list of organizations and departments that publish animal advocacy strategy research:

• Animal Advocacy Careers - “researching career trajectories and addressing ​talent constraints in the animal movement”.
• Animal Ask - founded with the express aim to optimise and prioritise future asks to assist animal advocacy organisations in their efforts to reduce farmed animal suffering. We provide organisations with in-depth research, narrowly targeted at key decisions between different animal asks, supporting organisations, individual activists, policymakers and donors so that they may do more good in the long term.
• Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) - charity reviews, intervention reviews, general research, advocacy advice, interviews, and more.
• Animal Ethics - resources on ethics, sentience, animal exploitation and wild animal suffering.
• Charity Entrepreneurship - a research and training program aimed at creating multiple high-impact charities. A lot of their 2019 research was about what new animal-focused charities would be the most impactful.
• CIWF research, CIWF USA research
• Faunalytics - original research focusing on farmed animal and movement-building topics, a library of lay-friendly summaries of academic research, and one-on-one support for advocates who want help finding data or designing or understanding research.
• fishcount - estimates of wild-caught and farmed fish numbers, discussion of fish welfare issues.
• Fish Welfare Initiative - will do research about welfare reforms for fish in the next 5 months.
• MFA research - evaluations to optimize various advocacy strategies.
• OpenPhil - the largest funder in farm animal advocacy (~$35 million per year), shares some of its internal research.
• Rethink Priorities - animal-related research so far focused on neglected groups of animals, corporate campaigns, and wild animal welfare.
• Sentience Institute - meta-level research for the EAA community.
• THL Labs - “informing advocacy strategies through actionable research on their effectiveness”.
• Wild Animal Initiative - “working to understand and improve the lives of animals in the wild.” Previously, it was two organizations: Utility Farm and Wild-Animal Suffering Research. Some of the texts are only available on the websites of these defunct organizations. They merged in 2019.

In total, there seem to be about 35 full time researcher equivalents in animal advocacy research space. Note that I excluded organizations like Asia Research and Engagement (ARE), Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return (FAIRR), Centre for Animal Welfare Science Excellence and Animal Welfare Foundation that do or fund animal welfare related research that is not directly about advocacy strategy. I also excluded clean meat research.

For incomplete lists of animal advocacy organizations in general see all ACE’s charity reviews and a list of OWA organizations.

Newsletters

Main newsletters:

• But Can They Suffer - monthly summaries of the most relevant new EAA research. The last three newsletters can be seen here.
• OpenPhil Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter - original content by OpePhil. All previous newsletters are available in the archive.
• THL Labs newsletter - updates include monthly summaries of farm animal advocacy research (e.g. see a summary for January 2020 here)

Most organizations listed in the section above have newsletters that update about their new research. For example, there is Animal Charity Evaluators newsletter, Animal Advocacy Careers newsletter, Faunalytics newsletter and Rethink Priorities newsletter.

Research repositories/libraries

• The Animal Studies Repository by HSUS - “an open access collection of academic, archival, and assorted other materials related to various disciplines within the fields of animal studies and animal welfare science.”
• Faunalytics library - “the world's biggest library of research about animal issues and animal advocacy.”
• ACE research library
• Animal Ethics bibliography
• Animal Advocacy Data Repository - “an online repository for animal advocates to post or cross-post any research outputs that they want to make publicly available, such as hypothesis pre-registrations, analysis plans, study materials, raw data, and analysis code.”
• GFI’s Essential Readings and Research about clean meat and plant-based alternatives to animal products
• Reducing Wild Animal Suffering Literature Library. An older version of it can be seen on the EA forum. A more recent locked version can be seen here.

Websites on law and policy

• The Coller Animal Law Forum (CALF) " is an interactive database that collates and analyses various laws and policies that impact farmed animals."
• WAP animal protection index "ranks 50 countries around the world according to their animal welfare policy and legislation."
• Animal Rights Index "helps identify which countries are the best and worst for animal rights in 2021."
• Brooks Animal Law digest - weekly updates about animal law
• Animal Legal and Historical Center: "On this site you will find a comprehensive repository of information about animal law, including: over 1200 full text cases (US, historical, and UK), over 1400 US statutes, over 60 topics and comprehensive explanations, legal articles on a variety of animal topics and an international collection."

Notable personal blogs/websites

• Counting Animals (Harish Sethu) - quantitative information related to farm animals
• Essays on Reducing Suffering (Brian Tomasik) - includes writings about suffering of wild animals and invertebrates. Written from a negative utilitarian perspective.
• The Vegan Strategist (Tobias Leenaert) - “Posts about friendly and pragmatic vegan and animal rights activism.”
• But Can They Suffer (Jamie Harris) - “Reviews, reflections and recommendations for Effective Animal Advocacy”
• Jayson Lusk - Food and Agricultural Economist who often writes about issues related to animal advocacy, despite not being an animal advocate himself.
• Reflective Disequilibrium (Carl Shulman) - the blog covers a variety of topics related to altruism. The link filters for posts that are related to animals.
• Sentientist.org (Diana Fleischman) - evolution, sentience and human psychology

Conferences

Conferences that are focused on animal advocacy:

• Animal Advocacy Conference in Asia - new conference that will be held in 2020
• Animal Rights National Conference (U.S.)
• Asia for Animals Conference
• CARE (Conference on Animal Rights in Europe) - talks from previous conferences can be seen here.
• Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics Summer Schools (UK)
• Reducetarian Summit (U.S.)
• Taking Action for Animals (July 25th-27th, 2020 in Washington, DC, U.S.)
• The University of Kent’s Animal Advocacy Conference (June 24th-26th, 2020 in Canterbury, UK)

The list above excludes:

• Clean meat and plant-based alternative events like The Good Food conference and Cultured Meat Symposium. A continuously updated calendar of such events can be seen here.
• Animal law conferences like Animal Law Conference, Canadian Animal Law Conference, and Conference on Animal Law, Ethics & Policy.
• Animal advocacy conferences that seem focus on topics and approaches that I don’t consider to be associated with the EAA movement like The Animal Liberation Conference and International Animal Rights Conference, Note that the distinction is subjective and based only on my limited understanding of these conferences.
• Conferences like EA Global, LEAP, or vegfest that don’t have animal advocacy as a primary focus. These conferences may nevertheless be useful for animal advocates.

Podcasts

• Wildness podcast (about wild animal welfare)
• Our Hen House
• Cultured Meat and Future Foods Podcast
• The Sentience Institute Podcast
• Morality is hard
• 80,000 hours
  • Episode with Lewis Bollard of Open Philanthropy Project: How to end factory farming as soon as possible.
  • Episode with Sharon Nunez and Jose Valle of Animal Equality: Going undercover to expose animal cruelty, get rabbit cages banned and reduce meat consumption.
  • Episode with Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute: Bruce Friedrich makes the case that inventing outstanding meat replacements is the most effective way to help animals
  • Episode with Marie Gibbons: How exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it into every supermarket, according to food scientist Marie Gibbons
• The Most Interesting People I Know
  • Leah Garcés on Working with Factory Farmers to Help Animals
  • Lewis Bollard on Ending Factory Farming

Funds

• Funds managed by Animal Charity Evaluators:
  • Animal Advocacy Research Fund - see their completed projects here.
  • EAA Fund - funds non-research organizations, especially newer organizations focused on farmed animals
  • Recommended Charity Fund - simplifies the donation process for people who trust ACE’s charity recommendations. 100% of the Fund supports ACE’s recommended charities, and its disbursement is determined by ACE’s research team
• Animal Ethics - offers grants for research in the intersection of ecology and wild animal welfare science.
• Culture & Animals Foundation - funds academic and artistic projects that raise public awareness about concern for animals
• EA Animal Welfare Fund
• EAF Funds - animal welfare is not the focus of the grant but they have funded some work in this area
• OWA Grants - supports institutional cage-free and broiler welfare campaigns
• The Pollination Project - small grants for activists and advocacy groups “in Brazil, India, Mexico, and possibly Thailand and Vietnam.”
• Tiny Beam Fund - research grants and fellowships
• Several groups offer grants or fellowships for research into animal-free food technologies, including New Harvest, Purple Orange Ventures, GFI and the University of Colorado Boulder.
• VegFund and many other funds support vegan advocacy. There is a list of such funds here.

Also see:

• Animal Grantmakers - they help to maximize the effectiveness of work undertaken by animal protection funders.
• Farmed Animal Funders - a group of individuals and foundations giving more than $250,000 per year to end factory farming.

Miscellaneous

• Job Boards
  • 80,000 Hours job board (filtered for jobs in animal advocacy)
  • GFI’s job board - jobs, internships, and funding opportunities
  • EA Work Club (filtered for animal welfare)
• Collaboration directories
  • Animal Advocacy Research Fund directory (for researchers)
  • Effective animal advocacy community directory (for all animal advocates)
  • Effective Altruism Hub
• Facebook groups
  • Effective Animal Advocacy - Discussion - global, active group
  • Veggie EA Hangout - for casual chat with other effective altruists who are vegans, vegetarians, or reduceatarians
  • Vegan Researchers & Enthusiasts - this group also shares research related to animal advocacy, with a slightly broader (non-EA-specific) remit
  • Effective Animal Altruism London
  • Effective Animal Altruism Stockholm
  • Effective Animal Activism - Asia
• EA Animal Advocacy community on Reddit
• GFI’s resources page
• ethical.diet - a website that visualizes the impact of food choices
• UK opportunities for effective involvement in reducing animal suffering (a spreadsheet by Jamie Harris)
• WattAgNet.com - “news and analysis on the global poultry and animal feed industries.” It can sometimes be useful to read articles that are written for the decision makers in factory farming. Links to some articles that I found somewhat useful can be seen in this facebook post. I’m unsure if this website is trustworthy and how it compares to other similar websites.
• Wikipedia templates about Animal rights and Animal welfare - links to Wikipedia articles about many relevant topics

Notable written works

• Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy (Sentience Institute)
• Estimates of global captive vertebrate numbers (Rethink Priorities)
• Worse things happen at sea: the welfare of wild-caught fish (fishcount)
  • Executive summary (6 pages)
  • Summary report (49 pages)
  • Full report (141 pages)
• Leafleting Review (ACE)
• When can I eat meat again? - expected timelines for animal product alternatives
• Is the Percentage of Vegetarians and Vegans in the U.S. increasing? (ACE)
• Study Of Current And Former Vegetarians And Vegans (Faunalytics)
• Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good? The Role of Dietary Choices, Perceptions, and Experiences in Meat Consumption Patterns in the U.S. (Kathryn Asher’s Doctoral Dissertation) - see a summary by Faunalytics here.
• Report on the Welfare Differences Between Cage and Cage-Free Housing (OpenPhil)
• The Ethical Case for Welfare Reform (THL)
• Farmed Fish Welfare Report (ACE)
• 2017 Report on Consciousness and Moral Patienthood (OpenPhil)
• Invertebrate Welfare Cause Profile and Invertebrate Sentience Table (Rethink Priorities)
• How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach (book by Tobias Leenaert)
• Food, Animals, and the Environment (book by Christopher Schlottmann and Jeff Sebo)
• Utilitarianism and Nonhuman Animals (Jeff Sebo)

This article is a project of Rethink Priorities. It was primarily written by Saulius Šimčikas. Thanks to Jacob Peacock, Jamie Harris, Marianne van der Werf and Peter Hurford for contributing to the post.