Animal Ethics: Marginal Funding Request for 2026 Outreach on Neglected Animal Advocacy Topics

By Animal_Ethics @ 2025-11-19T15:19 (+19)

TL;DR

Seeking $105k–$180k to sustain and expand three programs:
- AI & Animals documentary dissemination
- Wild Animal Suffering documentary
- Seantience: aquatic animal sentience campaign
Marginal funding enables multilingual translations, documentary distribution, campus outreach, technical reports, Asia-focused engagement, and long-term financial stability.
Our work targets high-impact, neglected areas with limited existing public-facing resources and strong leverage via early outreach.
Funding is used with relative operational frugality: 0–17% fundraising, 66–90% programs depending on tier.
For more information on how to donate please refer to this link.

Who We Are

Animal Ethics is an international organization focused on outreach on neglected domains of sentience: wild animal welfare, invertebrates, aquatic animals, and future sentient beings.
We maintain a 2,000-page multilingual library, have given 300+ talks globally, and develop training materials such as a 27-unit course on wild animal welfare and advocacy.
In our recent work we emphasize on advocacy in Asia, including collaborations in India, China, and Japan and releases such as the Hindi wild-animal-advocacy course and recent release of our documentary Seantience, as well as a forthcoming documentary on AI and animals.

Why These Areas Are Neglected and Important

Across animal advocacy, several leverage points remain under-addressed:

AI’s role in shaping animal outcomes (e.g., embedded value-errors in LLMs, industrial-farming deployment).
Wild animal suffering receives minimal institutional attention despite enormous scale; most public resources focus on conservation, not welfare of wild animals.
Aquatic animals, especially invertebrates, comprise the majority of farmed animals globally yet lack accessible, scientifically grounded public materials.
Asia drives most global aquatic-animal production; although outreach here is rarely resourced proportionally.
Documentary-format advocacy is especially scalable, yet almost no high-quality public media exists for these issues.
Educators and academic institutions lack packaged, evidence-based curricula on these topics.
Multilingual dissemination remains a widely cited bottleneck.
Early-stage issue uptake often shows returns disproportionate to cost (based on historical movement-building patterns).

Our 2026 Plans

1. AI & Animals Documentary Dissemination

The film (releasing soon) features researchers and advocates analyzing how AI may reshape animal farming, policy, and advocacy efforts.

Target Funding will support:

Translations and dubbing into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese
Multilingual campaign website with screening guides, calls to action, and partner opportunities
Distribution across multiple platforms and regions
Talks, screenings, and conference participation

2. Wild Animal Suffering Documentary

We will produce a 20 to 30-minute accessible documentary that introduces the harms faced by wild animals. There is currently no documentary of this kind on this topic despite abundant evidence on harms and strong moral relevance.
Expected outputs:

High-quality, publicly accessible film
Integration with existing educational resources
Partnered dissemination similar to the above project.

3. Seantience: Aquatic Animal Sentience Campaign

Designed to expand the moral circle and fill a major awareness gap.
Target audiences: high-school teachers, university courses, academic platforms, and advocacy organizations in the English-speaking world, China, and India.

Components:

Documentary (English + Chinese) presenting aquatic animals as individuals with interests
Technical reports summarizing scientific knowledge on sentience and welfare
Targeted outreach: talks, workshops, conferences, online events
Hosted on a new dedicated website

Our Funding Gap

Funding Level	Allocation Breakdown	What This Level Enables
Minimum - $105k	10% operations 0% fundraising 90% programs	Completion of the Seantience documentary in Chinese ≥1 language expansion for AI & Animals Limited outreach (mostly remote) Moderate outreach for the Wild Animal Suffering documentary Reliance on our current organisational reserve funds
Full - $145k	17% operations 0% fundraising 83% programs	Full AI & Animals rollout in 3 languages Standard dissemination campaigns Full production of the Wild Animal Suffering documentary Seantience technical reports + educational resources Additional outreach in Asia
Optimal - $180k	17% operations 17% fundraising 66% programs	In this scenario, we would allocate part of the raised funds, alongside a portion of our reserves, to diversify our income sources, expand our donor base, and secure sustainable funding for future years. Additional distribution channels & partnerships More screenings, educator pilots Stronger conference presence & publication pipeline

What impact can your donation have?

Marginally, your contribution would enable us to influence:

Early shaping of public understanding of underrepresented topics in animal-welfare
Multilingual dissemination, allowing this information to reach audience across multiple populous regions.
Reaching out to large populations in Asia.
Creation of durable educational content that can be used by teachers and academics
Movement capacity expansion through AI-tool adoption
Audiovisual media outputs that be circulated across platform over time.

How to Donate?

You can find more information about how to donate on this link.

If there is interest, we can run an AMA on the Forum to discuss any uncertainties about prioritization, and methodological details.