Announcing the Animal Welfare Library 🦉

By arvomm, Eleos Arete Citrini @ 2023-05-17T17:07 (+68)

TL;DR

Introducing the Animal Welfare Library (AWL🦉): a web repository of animal welfare resources. We hope the library is useful for:

1. People who want to learn about animal welfare. 
2. More advanced users seeking references or organisations related to animal ethics and effective animal advocacy projects. 

The library contains:

• Books
• Articles
• Organisations
• Videos and Films
• Repositories
• Advocates
• News
• Podcasts
• And more, like newsletters, coming soon…

We want AWL to be a link you can easily share with someone wanting to learn more about animal welfare. At 212 entries right now, the library is still expanding and is by no means exhaustive (suggest additions here or in the comments!). 

We found having a searchable and interactive overview of what is out there really helpful, and we hope you do too! We really value any feedback you might have!

Our Story

Today we just launched the Animal Welfare Library or AWL (pronounced owl /aʊl/ 🦉!). AWL is our answer to the question "what is the go-to place for finding high-quality animal welfare resources?". Here's our story… 

Arvo: When I began my journey to learn more about animal welfare, I realised that there was an overwhelming amount of information on the subject, varying substantially in quality. Over the months and years that followed, I came across several websites and organisations that seemed to be doing incredible work and sharing valuable insights, and I frequently found myself wishing I had known about these resources from the start. I also started to see the interdisciplinary nature of the endeavour which made me realise that it would be particularly beneficial to develop a tool to catalogue some of the knowledge we possess and build a home for a centralised repository of valuable resources.

Eleos: The plight of badly-off humans and other animals has been a priority of mine for many years. There has always been a sense of urgency behind my thinking: to me, practical philosophy isn’t simply a set of interesting puzzles, but a fundamentally important enterprise to make the world a better place. A few years ago, I embarked on my path to study how I could apply my compassion more systematically in a way that helps me be more effective at making this world a better place. In summer 2021, I started gathering resources on animal ethics and helping animals that would help others make a difference, which resulted in this compilation (and this forum post) that would later help ground this project.

In 2022, we met and found we had an aligned vision for a project like AWL. We joined forces and decided to make the library happen.

This is how this project was born. This website is the resource we wish we had had in our hands when we started learning about animal welfare and humanity’s role in helping end the neglected suffering of millions of animals.

Go to the library here: Animal Welfare Library.

Structure of the Site

The website is structured into home, library and act now pages. (We are also drafting a `why care’ page summarising key arguments in the animal welfare space). The home page has some highlighted resources and organisations and it prompts visitors to explore the library. The Library has all the resources we compiled and the options to filter and search (desktop only) for specific items, themes or key terms. The act now is split into four parts: career (which redirects to Animal Advocacy Careers), donations (redirecting to Animal Charity Evaluators), expanding our social influence and eating plant-based (each of these last two redirects to a subset of relevant resources within the library). When possible, we tried to keep things minimalistic. 

Feedback

This is all still work in progress - we wanted to put it out there because we don't want to fall prey to the perfectionist mindset.  We're actively seeking and implementing feedback, and we would really appreciate any of your thoughts on how to make this better or any resources you think we should add! Please feel free to comment below or share your thoughts directly on our website.

A special thank you to everyone who supported this project.