Aquatic Animal Funding Recommendations

By Zoë Sigle 🔹 @ 2025-08-14T17:17 (+58)

Executive Summary

Aquatic animals—fish, shrimp, crabs, and other decapods—are the most numerous animals farmed for food, yet they receive just 11 % of global farmed animal welfare philanthropy (which is less than 0.5% of all global philanthropy). With  100 billion farmed fish and 440  billion farmed shrimp slaughtered every year, supporting high‑leverage interventions in this space offers one of the clearest opportunities to alleviate mass suffering at scale.

In 2025, Farmed Animal Funders (FAF) hosted the Aquatic Animal Funding Circle for major donors. After six months of co-learning, a request for proposals, co-evaluating, and co-funding, the funding circle members and aligned funders allocated funding to ten organizations. While not every funder funded every organization, FAF generally views these organizations as offering complementary tactics—corporate pressure, producer training, policy lock‑ins, and evidence generation—to form a coherent strategy for rapid, durable welfare gains.

FAF expects the recommended groups can absorb additional grants up to $100,000 (for smaller organizations) or more (for larger organizations). Anyone interested in larger grants should reach out directly to the organizations or to Farmed Animal Funders to confirm further absorption capacity. Please note, an organization’s inclusion below does not mean that all funding circle members nor all FAF members endorse their work.

Beyond these ten, additional organizations may be strong fits for other donors’ theories of change, geographic or species preferences, or intervention preferences.

We encourage donors to donate directly to the recommended organizations. If you prefer a single donation for distribution across grantees, please reach out to Zoë Sigle. 

Why aquatic animals? Why now?

The movement to protect farmed aquatic animals is a nascent movement when compared with the movement to protect farmed land animals. Despite being a relatively new area for funder focus, the number of farmed aquatic animals eclipses the number of farmed land animals and is expected to grow. 

Aquatic animals, including finfishes and shrimps, are farmed in the hundreds of billions and caught from the wild in the trillions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has called for a 75% increase in aquaculture farming. We know that the more entrenched an industry, the more difficult it is to oppose the industry. 

In recent years, a range of organizations supporting farmed aquatic animal welfare have launched and demonstrated successful interventions, such as:

• Engaging with certifiers to improve the animal welfare standards of their certifications. 
• Recognizing crustaceans as sentient beings in the UK Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill.
• Securing major retailer commitments to end eyestalk ablation and require electric stunning for shrimp.
• Collaborating with aquaculture farmers in India to improve fish welfare via water quality and stocking density improvements.
• Preventatively banning octopus farming in various jurisdictions. 

Funding Recommendations

Strategic Themes

The Aquatic Animal Funding Circle funded projects grouped into four key themes:

1. Corporate commitments for shrimps: Funding both collaborative advisors with assertive campaigners accelerates corporate pledges while keeping asks practical.
2. Producer‑level welfare improvements: Training farmers and processors ensures commitments translate into on‑farm change, not just policy documents.
3. Policy lock‑in: Legislative reforms embed welfare standards or ban certain practices.
4. Evidence & learning pipeline: Targeted research and shared data dashboards avoid advocacy blind spots and keep the movement supplied with the next tractable ask.

Recommended Organizations

Funding circle members and aligned funders granted over $1.5 million to the following organizations. Applications and evaluations are available by request for qualified funders.

Measurable Outcomes

We recommend tracking grants’ progress based on outcomes such as (but not limited to):

• Animals affected: Fish/shrimp covered by pledges or on‑farm reforms.
• Commitments secured: Number of retailer/producer policies changed.
• Legal gains: Bills passed or regulations amended.
• Technology deployed: Stunners installed; farms audited.

Other Grants

Beyond the ten highlighted grants, we received proposals from 18 additional organizations seeking funding for various projects, such as:

• Prevent open-net salmon farming expansion and eliminate existing operations, through local activist support, global awareness campaigns, and other interventions.
• Slowing the growth of the US aquaculture through legal advocacy paired with impactful undercover investigations.
• Prevent the development and expansion of intensive aquaculture across Europe.
• Stop octopus farming in US states or in the EU.
• Challenge and weaken the narrative that industrial aquaculture is a sustainable solution to food security and climate change.
• Strengthen major aquaculture certification schemes to enforce higher welfare standards.

While these were not all extensively evaluated nor funded by the funding circle members, interested funders can reach out to review proposals and request further evaluation for major ($50,000+) grant amounts.

How to Fund

We encourage donors to donate directly to the recommended organizations. 

Farmed Animal Funders supports aligned funders. If you need additional information about proposals, support in grant evaluation, or prefer a single donation for distribution across grantees, please reach out to me (FAF’s Director of Philanthropic Advising & Programs, Zoë Sigle). 

We kindly ask that you inform Farmed Animal Funders of your direct donation amounts, so we can track organizations’ funding gaps and our impact.