Prioritizing Causes

Introduction
Detailed

What is cause prioritization?

We use cause prioritization to refer to the process wherein organizations or donors select among causes (broad areas of charitable or advocacy activity) for those which are most likely to provide opportunities for especially effective interventions or donations. Once promising causes have been identified, the search can proceed toward determining which specific actions or organizations within those causes are likely to be most effective.

The range of causes considered in a cause prioritization effort can vary. For instance, some people consider any cause that helps humans or animals, while others consider only causes that help humans, only causes that help animals, or other restricted sets of causes.

This does not mean that everyone who has chosen a cause to support does so as a result of what we are calling cause prioritization. We can clarify with examples:

Pat has always felt a special connection to animals. Since seeing a leaflet with a chick on the cover that advocated a vegan diet, Pat donates to vegetarian outreach groups because they, like Pat, care about animals and want their lives to be better. Pat might start donating to other animal causes, but plans to always support these groups to some extent, because their work is good for animals.

Robin has always felt a special connection to animals. For a while, Robin volunteered at and donated to the local animal shelter. Then, after thinking about how to help the most animals with limited time and resources, Robin started leafleting for and donating to veg outreach groups. Robin stopped supporting the local animal shelter with time and money—even though they do good work—because Robin believes the outreach groups’ work is more important.

Even though Pat and Robin support the same cause, their reasoning is very different. Pat has chosen to support vegetarian outreach groups because they do good work, without comparing them to groups using other methods to help animals. Robin has thought about multiple ways that people can help animals, and chosen to help groups that are using the techniques that seem most effective. We would say that Robin has done some cause prioritization, but Pat has not, based on this information alone.

Why prioritize causes?

Cause prioritization makes sense for organizations and individuals who support many causes in theory and want to direct their limited resources where they can do the most good. For example, animal advocates who want to help all animals live satisfying lives free from suffering can choose between many opportunities to help animals, from helping place dogs and cats for adoption, to protesting animal experimentation, to fighting factory farming. It’s unlikely that all these activities are equally helpful. Thinking carefully about which causes to prioritize can help advocates make the largest difference possible.

How do people decide which causes to prioritize?

A common framework for cause prioritization uses three criteria to assess which causes are most promising:

Scale: Does the cause attempt to solve important, large-scale problems? If efforts in this area were completely successful, how much better would the world be?
Tractability: How easy or hard is it to make progress on the issue? Can the problems be partially or completely solved with current knowledge and technology?
Neglectedness: Does the cause get less attention or resources than other causes with similar scale and tractability? Are there important activities in need of more funding?

Taken together, these three criteria (or variations on them) help identify causes where meaningful progress can be made efficiently. They help people to avoid focusing on small problems, problems on which they aren’t prepared to make progress, or problems that are already receiving so many resources that more won’t be very helpful.

This page offers a detailed overview of the considerations involved in prioritizing animal causes. Specifically, we consider the scale, tractability, and neglectedness of various causes, following a common framework for identifying causes where work can have especially high returns.

Scale

The scale of a cause refers to its size and intensity.¹ The most important causes deal with severe, large-scale problems, while less important causes might deal with local problems or with problems that have less severe impacts on those affected. We distinguish between a large-scale cause and one on which we should focus many of our resources. If directing our resources and attention towards a cause would not be expected to contribute to solving the problems involved more thoroughly or quickly, but the cause deals with a severe, large-scale problem, we will say that the cause is important but we should focus our attention on a cause that we can contribute to more productively. Accordingly, our main criteria for the scale of animal causes are the numbers of animals involved and the amount that each individual affected would benefit from successful work on each cause.²

How many animals are involved?

Previous research on the number of animals living in various environments, as well as statistics compiled by governments and other agencies, can be used to determine how many animals are directly targeted by most types of animal advocacy. We summarize our findings in the table below. (All estimates are for the number of animals alive, globally, at any given time. The population of humans is included for reference.)

	Global Population
Humans³	7.3 x 10⁹
Lab Animals (vertebrates)⁴^,⁵	about 10⁸
Farmed Animals⁶	3.3 x10¹⁰
Wild Animals (vertebrates)⁷	at least 10¹³
Wild Animals (total)⁸	about 10¹⁹
Companion Animals⁹	about 10⁹
All Animals¹⁰	about 10¹⁹

Most of these estimates, especially those dealing with wild animals, are quite tentative, but because they vary by orders of magnitude, the differences they show between groups are likely to persist even when errors are accounted for. Specifically, there are about a billion times more wild animals than animals in any situation directly under human control—and even if our estimates are significantly off, or we exclude invertebrates from the analysis, the gap in numbers is still extremely large.¹¹ By the numbers, addressing the situation of animals in the wild is by far the most large-scale animal cause.

Looking at the situation in more detail, lab animals form the smallest group on our list, with about 100 million vertebrates in labs worldwide at any given time.¹² We weren’t able to find an estimate for the number of lab animals that also included the many invertebrates, such as flies, that are commonly used in research. Regulations dealing with lab animals commonly focus on vertebrate species, and often only certain vertebrates.¹³ For example, in the United States, academic laboratories must report the numbers of certain animals they use, but this excludes even common vertebrates such as rats, mice, and fish, as well as invertebrates like flies.¹⁴ The above total is therefore an underestimate of the total number of animals used in research worldwide. Efforts to help laboratory animals address a large-scale problem, but it seems small by the standards of others we will consider.

Companion animals form the next smallest group on our list. The estimate of 1 billion animals worldwide is composed primarily on the basis of other estimates for the numbers of dogs and cats living as companions to humans, so it is again an underestimate for the total number of companion animals worldwide.¹⁵ However, most animal advocacy aimed at helping companion animals aims to help those without a home or without access to veterinary care,¹⁶ which is only a fraction of the total companion animal population. For instance, HSUS estimates that there are 160-180 million dogs and cats in US homes, about 85% of which have been spayed or neutered (requiring some access to veterinary care; of course some people who could spay or neuter companion animals choose not to and do provide other veterinary care). They estimate that under 8 million dogs and cats, about 4% of the total population, enters shelters each year.¹⁷ If outreach seeks to affect only 4–15% of companion animals, this is an affected population of about 40-150 million animals worldwide. Again, this is a large number of animals, but when we consider other animal causes, it seems much smaller. Even if this estimate is too low because companion animals other than dogs and cats are not included in the estimate or because the fraction of needy companion animals is higher in areas with fewer resources, a revised estimate would still probably be quite low compared to the populations of farm and wild animals.

Animals used on farms make up the majority of those raised and used by humans, with an estimated 33 billion land animals alive at any given time.¹⁸ This estimate is more exact than any other we will consider, since governments conduct counts of livestock in order to understand and regulate local economies.¹⁹ However, this is a somewhat similar undercounting to what we saw for lab animals: fish and shellfish are not counted, and in some areas they are raised for consumption in large numbers.²⁰ The estimates also neglect other animals used for food, such as wild fish or commonly hunted land animals, although these animals may be affected by some of the advocacy aimed at helping farmed animals through promoting diet change. Even with these omissions, this estimate is 100-1000 times higher than our estimates for the numbers of animals affected by advocacy for companion or lab animals, suggesting that farm animal advocacy is the most important cause of the three—at least in terms of the number of animals involved.

We have two separate estimates for the number of wild animals: about 10 trillion vertebrates (which is more comparable to the estimates we’re using for the size of other groups of animals, which dealt with similar subsets of the animals truly affected) and about 10 quintillion animals in total, including invertebrates such as shellfish and insects.²¹^,²² Although counting the number of wild animals is very difficult and these estimates are therefore tentative, it is immediately clear that there are many more wild animals than animals in situations controlled directly by humans, a result that makes intuitive sense especially when small animals (from mice to insects) are considered.²³ Furthermore, there are many more insects and small animals generally than large charismatic mammals, a point that must be considered in assessing which types of wild animal advocacy are most important.²⁴ By numbers alone, advocacy directed at helping all wild animals is by far the most important cause dealing with a subgroup of all animals.

Finally, some animal advocates explicitly attempt to do work, such as promoting antispeciesism, that helps all animals, including those in the wild and those under human control.²⁵ This work potentially affects the largest number of animals, but only a relatively small number more than work aimed exclusively at helping animals in the wild.

How much do animals stand to gain from the interventions?

How much animals stand to gain from interventions proposed or pursued by advocates depends on the difference between their current conditions and those that would be the goal of the intervention. Because the ways in which animals can suffer or experience pleasure are diverse, and individual animals’ capacities for joy or suffering are probably also diverse (and definitely not well understood), comparing the scale of two interventions is not always straightforward. Furthermore, advocates in a specific cause area often work on multiple interventions with varying effects. However, we can discuss some general considerations influencing our views of how much animals stand to gain.

Value systems

One crucial consideration is what value we are seeking to maximize. What interests do animals have, and in what situations are those interests satisfied? Most people interested in animal causes would agree that animals can experience some degree of suffering and pleasure, and that one of the goals of animal advocacy is to reduce animal suffering, and if possible to provide animals with lives that are pleasant on balance.²⁶ Most would also agree that animals have an interest in not dying, or (more practically) in dying with as little pain as possible, after as long a life as possible.²⁷

Some would also add that animals have an intrinsic right to freedom or to enact their natural behavior, implying that they should not be caged or controlled by humans even if this appears to reduce the amount that they suffer from hunger, disease, or predation.²⁸ Some would say that humans should not damage the purity of nature, and that animal suffering is acceptable as long as it occurs in this context, free from human interference.²⁹ Relatedly, some value the preservation of species, in addition to the experiences of individual animals.³⁰ Additionally, there is the question of when to prefer that animals are not brought into existence at all. (Or, phrased another way, whether it would be better to increase or decrease the overall number of animals alive, under specific conditions.)³¹

The differences between the many opinions people hold with regard to the issues in the previous paragraph mirror differences in philosophy and ethics that arise in dealing with human society and interests. Despite hundreds of years of discussion, thoughtful people still disagree about whether potential humans have an interest in being brought into existence,³² how much to value freedom from suffering as opposed to freedom to act independently,³³ and many related issues. It’s not reasonable for us to expect to fully resolve the equivalent issues that present themselves regarding nonhuman animals. In fact, these are more complicated than the equivalent issues for humans alone, because nonhuman animals have much more limited abilities to reveal their preferences to us.

Instead, we focus on the reduction of suffering and promotion of pleasure, because these are the areas where value systems are most likely to agree on what good results look like. We note that readers may have additional concerns, and those concerns may compete with those we focus on. For instance, someone who highly values animals’ rights to live free of human interference will likely find that most possible interventions to prevent wild animal suffering oppose that value, and may consider that, even though they prevent suffering, they are not worthwhile overall. However, we believe that most plausible value systems would lead us to largely the same decisions about which strategies and organizations are most effective, in the current conditions.

On the other hand, interventions that prevent wild animal suffering by changing the ways humans interfere with nature, such as by promoting habitat preservation, could still be worth supporting from this perspective.³⁴ Many advocates support interventions that reduce the number of animals in industrial agriculture, because those animals live lives of great suffering and little freedom, followed by premature and often painful deaths.³⁵ However, advocates who think that wild animals also live lives consisting primarily of suffering might want animal farming to reform but not end, because in their view the end of animal farming would be likely to result in an increase in the total amount of animal suffering (because the wild supports more animals per acre than farmed land does).³⁶ And most advocates will agree that increasing the number of people who consider animals worthy of moral concern is a positive result, regardless of the type of moral concern they feel animals deserve.³⁷

Even concentrating only on preventing suffering and premature death, there are still unresolved questions. If one intervention prevents suffering, while another prevents animals from being killed, how do we compare their value? How do we compare interventions that prevent suffering by improving the conditions animals live in to interventions that prevent suffering by preventing animals from being bred to live in bad conditions? How do we know how much suffering various conditions cause? If animals are not acutely suffering, how valuable is it to continue improving their lives? Again, we don’t expect that any decision we make on how to deal with these questions will be shared with all readers. We assume as little as possible, and try to present clearly what the expected effects are for a given intervention so readers can easily apply their own value systems to the evidence we collect.

Animal sentience and perceptions

Another important consideration is the nature of the animals affected by an intervention. ACE takes a firmly antispeciesist stance, meaning that we don’t believe in treating one animal as more important than another based on species membership.³⁸ However, this is not to say that all species are treated the same. Relevant characteristics of animals can vary between species, potentially by large amounts, and so it would be inappropriate to assume that there is a single set of conditions that would be suitable for all animals and all species. For instance, some animals have adapted to be comfortable in cold weather and others in hot weather; it would therefore be inappropriate to try to provide all animals the same living conditions. This extends beyond temperature to varying needs for space, interaction with other members of the same species, and other features of the environment.³⁹ It is also likely the case that different animals have different abilities to experience pain and stress, or comfort and pleasure.⁴⁰^,⁴¹

While science has answered some of our questions about how animals differ from one another and what certain animals prefer as living conditions, there are also many questions that could in theory be answered satisfactorily but haven’t actually been investigated in detail.⁴² We are working on summarizing the state of scientific knowledge about animal perceptions and cognitive capabilities and applying the conclusions in our work.⁴³ Until we have better research, we assume that any differences in ability to experience pain or stress are hard to predict from our intuitions. We treat all animals as benefiting similarly from similar-seeming changes in how well their needs are taken care of; for instance, we assume that pigs and chickens benefit similarly from being freed from intense confinement, although it may be the case that confinement is actually more stressful for chickens than pigs (or vice versa).

We expect that the current body of scientific evidence will provide more information about the sentience of some animals than others. In particular, some animals are more frequently used for behavioral studies aiming to show complex mental capabilities (often those animals like primates, dolphins, and crows, which have long been thought to be especially smart) than others.⁴⁴ Also, for animals whose physiology is similar to humans’, similar neural structures and chemical or hormonal responses to events can be taken as evidence of similar internal experiences.⁴⁵ Animals whose physiology is very different from humans’, such as invertebrates, may also have similar experiences arising from different physiological signals, but if so there will be fewer avenues of evidence available for learning this.⁴⁶ It therefore may be much longer before we are able to understand what they perceive and how. While research is ongoing, it is reasonable to perceive a lack of evidence of sentience or perception as weak evidence that these animals’ experiences are very different from our own, and may not include what we recognize as pain, fear, or other common sensations.

Given that there are many animals whose perceptive abilities we may not understand for a long time even if they are sentient, it is important to appropriately consider the interests even of animals that we do not know to be sentient.⁴⁷ For instance, if our search of the literature does not turn up strong evidence that insects either do or do not feel pain, we will consider both the possibility that insects do feel pain and the possibility that they do not when making decisions where that information is relevant. Evidence that is suggestive but not conclusive can help us place more weight on some possibilities and less on the others. This is consistent with our current position of treating all animals as though their perceptions are similarly sharp and similarly meaningful; since we don’t think intuition is a good guide to which nonhuman animals are most likely to be sentient, we act as though all are equally likely to be sentient until we have come to an understanding of the available evidence.⁴⁸

Tractability

A tractable cause is one where significant progress could be made relative to the total size of the issue with a realistic amount of resources. The most tractable causes are those for which we clearly understand what the problems are, understand the possible solutions, and have experience implementing them.⁴⁹ But many causes have only some of those characteristics. We might know what the problem is but not know whether our proposed solutions will work to solve it. We might know what the solution should be but not know whether we’ll be able to carry out our plans. Advocates might disagree about what the problems and solutions are, even if each side feels they clearly understand the issues.

All else being equal, this suggests that animal causes that attempt to rectify some harm humans do to nonhuman animals are more tractable than causes that attempt to aid animals in the wild. We have a much better understanding of how human-created systems work than we have of natural systems, so it is easier to make changes to them that will have predictable effects.⁵⁰ However, because not everyone agrees about what changes are desirable, even problems clearly caused by humans can have wildly varying tractability for animal advocates.

How well do we understand the problem and possible solutions?

If we can clearly articulate what the problem is and envision a world without that problem, we are in a good position to begin trying to solve the problem. If we only have a vague sense that something is not right in an area, we might have identified that a problem exists without knowing what the specific problem is. We may need to spend more time learning about the current situation before we can start trying to think of ways to improve it. For instance, many people who care about animals don’t like to think about predation in the wild; it’s bad for the animals being killed, but good or even necessary from the predator’s perspective.⁵¹ This makes it hard to locate the problem or envision a solution, meaning that it is an issue that is relatively intractable.

Similarly, there are some situations in which animal advocates can precisely describe a problem, but can’t agree on what the world should look like without it. For example, many animal advocates agree that industrial animal agriculture is abusive and should be stopped. However, there is disagreement on what system should replace it. Some advocates think that no animals should be farmed,⁵² while others think some farming could be net positive for the animals involved, who would probably not exist otherwise.⁵³ Some worry that without farming, domesticated species might die out, since they are not suited to life in the wild and humans wouldn’t have a reason to raise so many, or even any, of them.⁵⁴ Because advocates have identified a clear problem and some outcomes that would be better than the current situation, it’s possible to start trying to solve the problem. But because advocates don’t agree on an end goal, there’s debate about not just what tactics work best to solve the problem, but what a finished solution would look like.⁵⁵ This makes the problem less tractable, since advocates have to use resources trying to decide on a goal as well as trying to achieve it.

Some problems are very easy to understand, so advocates can clearly describe the problem, what the world would look like if it were solved, and even some solutions to the problem. For instance, cats and dogs are sometimes euthanized in animal shelters that can’t find homes for them.⁵⁶ Animal advocates want homes to be found for any such animals that need them. They try to solve this problem by encouraging or requiring people to spay or neuter their pets (to reduce the number of cats and dogs who need homes),⁵⁷ encouraging people to adopt animals from shelters rather than purchasing them from pet stores or breeders (to increase the number of people looking to provide homes to animals in shelters),⁵⁸ and donating money to shelters and foster programs that care for cats and dogs waiting to be adopted (so they can house animals for longer).⁵⁹ Collectively, these solutions have greatly reduced the number of cats and dogs euthanized in shelters.⁶⁰ The problem is well understood, although making further progress in solving it may be expensive in areas where all these solutions have already been implemented.

How hard are the solutions to implement?

Even if we understand a problem and have a good idea of what solutions are available, the solutions might not be easy to implement. Sometimes, people are already working on a solution, and we can observe their efforts to form a judgment about whether it is easy or hard. Other times, little work is being done towards the solutions we have in mind. This may be because others have viewed the solution as being too hard, or don’t think the problem is important. Because in this situation many of the difficulties involved with implementing the solution are unknown, it’s probably appropriate to assume it’s harder than it looks.⁶¹

For example, we could assess the difficulty of the various solutions involved in combating shelter euthanasia by trying to understand the activities of several local humane societies. We could ask them what difficulties they had encountered in trying to implement spay and neuter programs, trying to increase the spay and neuter rates in their areas, caring for animals that have not yet been adopted, and trying to promote their adoption programs. We would probably learn a lot from this about which activities are easiest to implement and about how expensive each activity is. We would also learn which programs had room for expansion in each area. If we wanted to start a humane society, we’d probably have a relatively easy time finding people who knew how to do the work involved, but we might have trouble raising funds or connecting to the local community.

On the other hand, solutions to wild animal suffering are more difficult to assess. Some are easier than others: for instance, sterile insect technique, which has been used to reduce insect populations in areas where they cause concerns for human health, offers a potentially more humane way to control insect populations than traditional insecticides,⁶² which can be unnecessarily harmful to insects and other animals in the environment.⁶³ But because it’s a relatively new technique used primarily for its benefits to humans, even practitioners may not be aware of all its difficulties from an animal welfare perspective. For instance, how does it affect the balance of other animal species in the environment?⁶⁴ Other solutions are even harder to envision and implement: for instance, some advocates have brought up the possibility of genetically engineering animals motivated by gradients of bliss rather than pain avoidance.⁶⁵ No one has done this successfully, and our understanding of biology and animal psychology is not even good enough to necessarily allow us to recognize success, so this is a very intractable solution at present.

How long will it take to fully implement the solutions?

What forces are opposed to the problem being solved?

Neglectedness

Assuming equal scale and tractability, causes that fewer people care about or work on are better to focus on than causes that many people care about or work on. Particularly good opportunities to work on causes that many people care about will almost certainly be taken; the marginal money or effort moved towards these causes will (if everyone is acting rationally) go to the remaining less effective approaches after the more effective possibilities are funded.⁶⁶ By contrast, very good opportunities to work on neglected causes may not be taken, simply because too few people are working on or funding the cause. The marginal money or effort moved to that cause may go to the most effective way of addressing it, if it is not fully funded.

Of course, it’s possible that the reason few people are interested in a cause would be that it isn’t large-scale or isn’t tractable, in which case its apparent neglectedness would actually signal that addressing it isn’t a very good use of resources. However, among animal causes, this often isn’t the primary reason for a cause being neglected. Many people value animal lives differently for speciesist reasons, or because the animals occupy different roles in human society. To animal advocates who assign value to animal experience based on the animal’s intrinsic characteristics, many animal causes appear to be neglected primarily because others do not recognize their scale, rather than because they are unimportant or intractable. These neglected causes may be especially good opportunities to make a difference.

For instance, in the United States many more resources are devoted to helping companion animals than to helping farmed animals, although there are many more distressed farmed animals than distressed companion animals. The most efficient ways of helping companion animals are likely to be almost fully funded, or fully funded in most areas.⁶⁷ However, there seem to be much more efficient ways of helping farmed animals that aren’t fully funded.⁶⁸ Most donors are more willing to donate to help companion animals, so even though they could help more animals by donating to a farm animal organization, they donate to opportunities to help companion animals, funding the most efficient ways to help these animals, and then also less efficient ways. Someone who does not care which animals they help could do more good by donating to help farmed animals, because fewer people have already donated to help them and so better opportunities to help are still available.

Similarly, donating to help companion animals in India or China could be more helpful than donating to help them in the United States, because the best opportunities to help may not already be taken.⁶⁹ In this case it is especially clear that neglectedness is not due to a lack of scale or tractability, because many of the techniques to help companion animals are applicable in any location, including setting up spay and neuter clinics and educating people about how to care for their pets. But because many donors want to help their local community and the United States is richer than China or India, these opportunities are better funded in the United States.

Overall

The most effective causes to support are likely to be relatively large-scale, tractable, and neglected. However, in reality it’s not likely that a single cause will be the most large-scale, the most tractable, and also the most neglected. We must weigh these attributes against each other when deciding where to prioritize our efforts.

It can help to summarize how all the causes we’re considering compare in each area. Of course, this is a rough tool to help us think about the issues, not a final judgment about them; as we’ve seen, scale, tractability, and neglectedness aren’t generally precisely measurable. Below, we compare our overall impressions regarding the causes of specific groups of animals. We rate each cause on a scale from 1 to 10 in each area, with 1 being the least large-scale, tractable, or neglected, and 10 the most.⁷⁰

	Scale	Tractability	Neglectedness
Lab Animals	3	4	5
Farmed Animals	6	6	8
Wild Animals	10	1	10
Companion Animals	1	10	1

Others may disagree with our ratings: for instance, perhaps some people have the intuition that helping lab animals is much more tractable than helping farmed animals. In fact, while ACE staff agree about the conclusions below, we would not all assign the same ratings in this chart. But once someone makes a decision about these ratings, they have implications for where to direct their resources. Our overall impressions of each cause follow.

Companion Animals

Wild Animals

There are so many wild animals that their cause is very large-scale even if only a minority of them are in distress, so we assigned it a very high rating for scale.⁷⁴ It is also a very neglected cause; although many organizations work to help wild animals in a general sense, few operate from a perspective that primarily values individual experience and that values members of all species appropriately.⁷⁵ (It’s much more common for organizations to work to preserve entire ecosystems⁷⁶ or to protect members of specific species,⁷⁷ either of which could actually be bad from a perspective that principally values individual experience and considers all animals.)⁷⁸

However, wild animal suffering is also a very intractable problem, both because it is not directly caused by humans (so we can’t simply stop the actions that lead to it) and because few people think about it from a perspective similar to ours, so the interventions we could use are not well-developed or understood.⁷⁹ Even when we can think of things that seem like they would help wild animals fairly cost-effectively, there may be difficulties to implementing them that we simply don’t know about because they haven’t been attempted.⁸⁰ We are also concerned that the general public has strong intuitions against intervention in the wild, and it’s not clear how easily these intuitions can be overcome through thoughtful advocacy, so convincing others to join in helping wild animals might be particularly difficult.⁸¹

Because the cause of wild animals is so large-scale and neglected, we should direct resources to it if we can find opportunities to contribute. Unfortunately, it’s hard to identify good opportunities, or even any opportunities that have definitely positive outcomes for wild animals, because the cause is so intractable.⁸² It makes sense to direct resources to research that helps make the cause more tractable and identifies opportunities to make a broader difference,⁸³ and to other ways of helping if we can find them.

However, funding research in order to do good is very difficult, especially for individual donors who can’t put in a lot of time to check on the performance of the groups they fund.⁸⁴ We think there are probably some good opportunities to fund projects that will make wild animal suffering a more tractable cause in the future, by promoting research and spreading public awareness, but for now we think these opportunities are best suited to donors who want to be very involved in a cause. We don’t think wild animal suffering is a tractable enough cause to offer demonstrated results to more casual donors.

Farm Animals

There are fewer farmed animals than wild animals, but they form the largest group of animals living under human control.⁸⁵ They’re also in conditions that generate particularly large amounts of suffering, so we rated their situation as fairly large-scale, though smaller than that of wild animals. There are some organizations working on helping farmed animals in ways that are plausibly effective, and they have had some successes, so we rated this cause as moderately tractable.⁸⁶ We didn’t rate it as very tractable because there are significant forces opposing advocates in this area (for instance, animal agriculture producers) and because none of the successes animal advocates have achieved so far seem to point to a way to end most or all of the suffering farmed animals experience; new tactics will probably have to be developed at some point in order for further progress to be made.⁸⁷^,⁸⁸ We rated this cause as very neglected, because although it is relatively large-scale and also reasonably tractable, only a small share of the resources devoted to helping animals is devoted to helping farmed animals.⁸⁹

We think helping farmed animals is the animal cause that currently offers the most promising blend of scale, tractability, and neglectedness. Improving the situation of farmed animals would make a big difference when they’re compared to other animals under human control, and—unlike in the case of wild animals—we are able to help them now. A variety of organizations around the world are working on diverse approaches to helping farmed animals, and many of these approaches appear to have led to improvements in animal welfare, changes in the way that people talk and think about farmed animals, and reductions in animal product consumption.⁹⁰ Most of them do not seem to be fully funded, as we would expect from a neglected field.⁹¹

A lot of the evidence for the success of particular approaches is not as strong as we would like, and we think that further research is one good activity to fund.⁹² But it is also likely that at least some current approaches, and possibly nearly all of them, are among the best ways we can now use significant amounts of resources to help animals. For the casual funder who wants a cause to support where the average organization will be helping many animals, farm animal advocacy is, in our opinion, the best match. For donors who want to do more research, but do not necessarily want to start an organization or fund very speculative research, we think that farm animal advocacy is a good place to look for organizations that can demonstrate high effectiveness.

Lab Animals

There are fewer lab animals than in any other group we’ve considered, but compared to companion animals many more of them are likely to be in distress, so we assigned this cause a low rating for scale, but higher than the one we gave companion animals.⁹³ The tractability of lab animal aid is similar to that for farmed animals: many organizations have done some work on the problem, and their approaches have led to some successes.⁹⁴ However, it’s not clear that they offer a way forward to complete or near complete resolution of the situation; entirely new methods may have to be developed at some point.⁹⁵ Some uses of lab animals may not be technically feasible to stop in the near-term, or at all, unless we accept reduced scientific progress as a consequence.⁹⁶ We rate the cause of lab animals as moderately tractable. Finally, the cause of lab animals receives less funding than the cause of farmed animals or companion animals. Since it’s also considerably smaller in scale than the cause of farmed animals, we don’t think it is more neglected than that cause, but it is clearly neglected by comparison to companion animals.⁹⁷ The is reflected in the low neglectedness rating we gave to the cause of lab animals, which is still higher than the rating we gave to the cause of companion animals.

Comparing the ratings of helping lab animals and helping farmed animals, the greater scale and neglectedness of the farm animal cause make it a better choice for cause-neutral animal advocates to focus on. There may still be some highly effective ways to help lab animals, but it will probably be hard to find opportunities to help lab animals that compare favorably to the best opportunities to help farmed animals, because there are so many more farmed animals.⁹⁸ Most advocates and donors should focus their resources on helping farmed animals (or wild animals if they can be very involved in more experimental work); only those who truly have special knowledge that enables them to help lab animals exceptionally efficiently should expect to be able to help animals most by focusing on lab animals.⁹⁹

Implications for ACE

ACE’s main impacts are through guiding the donations of relatively casual donors (who take their giving seriously, but aren’t able to or don’t want to be involved in setting the direction for the organizations they donate to) and through interacting with and advising existing animal advocacy organizations.¹⁰⁰^,¹⁰¹ We don’t have the resources or capacity to fund large amounts of work in new areas, either by doing the work ourselves or by helping set up organizations to do it or funding grants. Therefore, we expect that, until wild animal advocacy from a perspective close to ours is more developed generally, we will do the most good by focusing on the farm animal cause, including directing general animal advocates to that cause, identifying especially good opportunities within that cause, and advising donors and organizations working within farm animal advocacy.

However, because of the scale and neglectedness of wild animal suffering, we do want to remain alert for opportunities to direct appropriate resources toward that cause. We try to remain aware of the state of wild animal advocacy generally, and of particular groups working on addressing wild animal suffering from perspectives close to ours.¹⁰² We sometimes write about wild animal suffering, to help advance general awareness, one of the ways in which we think resources can be well-directed at this point in time.¹⁰³ If a new group focusing on wild animal suffering becomes able to demonstrate success in a way we think will be compelling to our audience, we would expect to attempt to review it more closely and consider it for a recommendation.

We do very limited work on advocacy around other specific animal issues such as use of animals in laboratories and companion animal homelessness, because we think good opportunities to help animals are much easier to find in the area of farm animal advocacy (and additionally the less popular area of wild animal suffering).¹⁰⁴ The work we do in these areas serves mainly to check our assumptions about the scale, tractability, and neglectedness of various causes. If we found these assumptions were wrong, we would reconsider which areas we should focus on.

Our scale, tractability, neglectedness framework is similar to the frameworks used by 80,000 Hours and GiveWell/Open Philanthropy Project. Both organizations discuss cause prioritization focusing primarily on causes that increase global welfare for humans.
Alternate criteria might include the severity of the suffering the animals endure or the complexity of their nervous systems. We treat both of these as included in the amount that the animals would benefit from successful work on the problem.
According to the U.S. Census’s International Data Base, the world midyear population for 2015 is estimated to be 7,256,490,000. —U.S. Census Bureau. (July 9, 2015). International Data Base. Version: Data:12.0625 Code:12.0321
While tracking is done in a variety of ways for different types of animals in different countries, very little attention is paid to non-vertebrates used in research. For example, one US report states: “In this report, animal is defined as any nonhuman member of the five classes of vertebrates: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish…. Other creatures customarily included in the animal kingdom, such as invertebrates (e.g., worms, insects, and crustaceans), are excluded by this definition. The use of human subjects is not examined in this assessment.” —U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. (February 1986). Alternatives to Animal Use in Research, Testing, and Education. Washington, DC.
“While growth has leveled off and there have been significant reductions in some countries, the number of animals used in research globally still totals almost 100 million a year.” —Hunter, Robert G. (January 1, 2014). Alternatives to Animal Testing Drive Market. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News. Vol. 34, No. 1.
This includes all categories of livestock tracked by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division (FAOSTAT) except for beehives. Their estimate for the total world livestock population in 2013 is 32,669,958,965. —FAOSTAT Database. Production: Live Animals.
Estimates of the total population of wild animals are in general very rough. However, the total appears to be at least 10¹³.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division (FAOSTAT) has estimated that the world annual capture of fish averaged between 9.7 x 10¹¹ and 2.7 x 10¹² by aggregating data from a variety of sources. Clearly the fish population alone must be well over 10¹² in order to support this rate of capture. This data provides a way to convert estimated biomass of fish to estimated numbers of fish; this results in an estimate of around 1.3 x 10¹³ fish in the wild, in total. —Tomasik, Brian. (November 9, 2013). One Trillion Fish. Reducing Suffering.
We can also use counts of the density of land animals in various environments to estimate their global populations. This results in estimates of around 10¹¹ birds, 10¹¹-10¹² land mammals, and 10¹²-10¹³ each of reptiles and amphibians. Combining these with even the smallest plausible numbers of fish results in a total of around 10¹³ wild animals. —Tomasik, Brian. (June 5, 2015). How Many Wild Animals Are There? Reducing Suffering.
The number of insects is so large that for the purposes of estimation it is probably reasonable to use as the total number of animals. “Insects also probably have the largest biomass of the terrestrial animals. At any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive.” —Smithsonian Institution. Information Sheet Number 18.
Estimates for the number of companion animals in various parts of the world include:
“In the EU there are more than 200 million pets in total (204,947,400) and 72 million homes have companion animals…. Worldwide there are 223 million dogs and 220 million cats (excluding strays).” —IFAH Europe. About Pets.”Pet ownership in the U.S. has more than tripled from the 1970s, when approximately 67 million households had pets, to 2012, when there were 164 million owned pets.” —Humane Society of the United States. (January 30, 2014). Pets by the Numbers.“Add in Australia and New Zealand, where pets outnumber humans, and Asia’s aggregate pet population now exceeds 488 million, according to Euromonitor.” —Montlake, Simon. (October 21, 2011). Animal Spirits Drive Asia’s Booming Pet Industry. Forbes.Considering all these estimates, it’s likely that the number of companion animals worldwide, including strays, is near 1 billion.
Most animals are accounted for in one of the groups in this chart. For the purposes of estimation, the total number of animals counted in the chart is very close to the total number of wild animals, around 10¹⁹
The difference may be smaller when invertebrates under human control are accounted for. But invertebrates are not commonly farmed or kept as pets, and the number of invertebrates used in laboratories is not likely to be nearly as high as the number in the wild.
“While growth has leveled off and there have been significant reductions in some countries, the number of animals used in research globally still totals almost 100 million a year.” —Hunter, Robert G. (January 1, 2014). Alternatives to Animal Testing Drive Market. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News. Vol. 34, No. 1.
In the U.S., animal research is governed primarily by the Animal Welfare Act, which defines “animal” to exclude many commonly researched species:
“Animal means any live or dead dog, cat, nonhuman primate, guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or any other warm-blooded animal, which is being used, or is intended for use for research, teaching, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet. This term excludes birds, rats of the genus Rattus and mice of the genus Mus, bred for use in research; horses not used for research purposes; and other farm animals, such as, but not limited to, livestock or poultry used or intended for use as food or fiber, or livestock or poultry used or intended for use for improving animal nutrition, breeding, management, or production efficiency, or for improving the quality of food or fiber. With respect to a dog, the term means all dogs, including those used for hunting, security, or breeding purposes.” —Crawford, Richard. Animal Welfare Act Quick Reference Guides. USDA. NAL. Animal Welfare Information Center.
In the U.S., reporting on animal research is governed primarily by the Animal Welfare Act, which defines “animal” to exclude many commonly researched species:
“Animal means any live or dead dog, cat, nonhuman primate, guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or any other warm-blooded animal, which is being used, or is intended for use for research, teaching, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet. This term excludes birds, rats of the genus Rattus and mice of the genus Mus, bred for use in research; horses not used for research purposes; and other farm animals, such as, but not limited to, livestock or poultry used or intended for use as food or fiber, or livestock or poultry used or intended for use for improving animal nutrition, breeding, management, or production efficiency, or for improving the quality of food or fiber. With respect to a dog, the term means all dogs, including those used for hunting, security, or breeding purposes.” —Crawford, Richard. Animal Welfare Act Quick Reference Guides. USDA. NAL. Animal Welfare Information Center.
Estimates for the number of companion animals in various parts of the world include:
“In the E.U. there are more than 200 million pets in total (204,947,400) and 72 million homes have companion animals…. Worldwide there are 223 million dogs and 220 million cats (excluding strays).” —IFAH Europe. About Pets.
“Pet ownership in the U.S. has more than tripled from the 1970s, when approximately 67 million households had pets, to 2012, when there were 164 million owned pets.” —Humane Society of the United States. (January 30, 2014). Pets by the Numbers.
“Add in Australia and New Zealand, where pets outnumber humans, and Asia’s aggregate pet population now exceeds 488 million, according to Euromonitor.” —Montlake, Simon. (October 21, 2011). Animal Spirits Drive Asia’s Booming Pet Industry. Forbes.
Considering all these estimates, it’s likely that the number of companion animals worldwide, including strays, is near 1 billion. The E.U. estimate explicitly includes a wide variety of companion animals, and the Asia estimate is vague about which animals are included—but the others explicitly cover only cats and dogs. Almost all explicitly cover only those companion animals with homes.
“Pet ownership in the U.S. has more than tripled from the 1970s, when approximately 67 million households had pets, to 2012, when there were 164 million owned pets….
83.3 million—Number of owned dogs…
83 percent—Percentage of owned dogs who are spayed or neutered…
95.6 million—Number of owned cats…
91 percent—Percentage of owned cats who are spayed or neutered.”
—Humane Society of the United States. (January 30, 2014). Pets by the Numbers.
“6 to 8 million—Number of cats and dogs entering shelters each year” —Humane Society of the United States. (January 30, 2014). Pets by the Numbers.
This includes all categories of livestock tracked by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division (FAOSTAT) except for beehives. Their estimate for the total world livestock population in 2013 is 32,669,958,965. —FAOSTAT Database. Production: Live Animals.
Even this relatively strong calculation involves some estimation:
“The data on livestock numbers are intended to cover all domestic animals irrespective of their age and the place or purpose of their breeding. Estimates have been made for non-reporting countries as well as for countries reporting incomplete data. However, in certain countries, data for chickens, ducks and turkeys do not yet seem to represent the total number of these birds. Certain other countries give a single figure for all poultry; data for these countries are shown under ‘Chickens’.” —FAOSTAT Database. Methods and Standards: Methodology: Agricultural Production —Livestock.
“According to the FAO report, the global aquaculture production (including fish and shellfish) in 2011 stood at nearly 54 million metric tons.” —Animal Charity Evaluators. (2014). Fish Number Calculations.
The number of insects is so large that for the purposes of estimation it is probably reasonable to use as the total number of animals. “Insects also probably have the largest biomass of the terrestrial animals. At any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive.” —Smithsonian Institution. Information Sheet Number 18.
Estimates of the total population of wild animals are in general very rough. However, the total appears to be at least 10¹³.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division (FAOSTAT) has estimated that the world annual capture of fish averaged between 9.7 x 10¹¹ and 2.7 x 10¹² by aggregating data from a variety of sources. Clearly the fish population alone must be well over 10¹² in order to support this rate of capture. This data provides a way to convert estimated biomass of fish to estimated numbers of fish; this results in an estimate of around 1.3 x 10¹³ fish in the wild, in total. —Tomasik, Brian. (November 9, 2013). One Trillion Fish. Reducing Suffering.
We can also use counts of the density of land animals in various environments to estimate their global populations. This results in estimates of around 10¹¹ birds, 10¹¹-10¹² land mammals, and 10¹²-10¹³ each of reptiles and amphibians. Combining these with even the smallest plausible numbers of fish results in a total of around 10¹³ wild animals. —Tomasik, Brian. (June 5, 2015). How Many Wild Animals Are There? Reducing Suffering.
Small animals can have much higher population density in a given environment, because they require less food and other resources per individual. Since larger animals are easier for humans to use for most purposes (especially animal agriculture), this is a factor that increases the number of wild animals we should expect to find relative to the number of animals under human control. Additionally, although many wild animals live in wild or uncultivated areas, many also live in urban or rural environments created by humans, so that every type of land use supports a population of wild animals, but not every type supports a population of animals used by humans.
The estimates above include 10¹¹–10¹² mammals of all sizes, out of about 10¹³ vertebrates and 10¹⁹ wild animals. This means that 1/100–1/10 of wild vertebrates are mammals (of any size), and under 1 in 1 million wild animals are mammals overall. Since many environments support a larger population of small mammals than of large ones (because small animals require fewer resources per individual), large charismatic mammals are even rarer than mammals in general. Of course large charismatic animals of other classes, such as birds, fish, and reptiles, are also relatively rare.
For instance, Animal Ethics and Defensanimal both prominently include arguments against speciesism in general in their work.
For example, the Five Freedoms are commonly cited by mainstream advocacy groups concerned with animal protection, and list four varieties of suffering to prevent and one source of pleasure with which animals should be provided:
- “Freedom from Hunger and Thirst by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigor.
- Freedom from Discomfort by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area.
- Freedom from Pain, Injury or Disease by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment.
- Freedom to Express Normal Behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind.
- Freedom from Fear and Distress by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.”
—American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Guiding Principles.
For example, “PETA has pushed for vegan living since our inception in 1980. Our motto is: “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.”….There is no such thing as humane meat.” —Newkirk, Ingrid. (September 28, 2012). Is There Such a Thing as ‘Humane’ Meat? PETA Blog.
On the other hand, many people who accept forms of animal use still strongly support efforts to make the ends of animals’ lives less painful. During the campaign for the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, President Eisenhower is supposed to have said, “If I went by mail, I’d think no one was interested in anything but humane slaughter,” a story which is quoted in places including the Congressional Record. —Congressional Record, V. 147, Pt. 7, May 22, 2001 to June 11 2001. 2005. Government Printing Office.
This viewpoint is seen in the fourth of the Five Freedoms (Freedom to Express Normal Behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind.) as well as in, for example, PETA‘s motto (Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.).
For example, we can see evidence of this thinking when animal advocacy groups conduct projects to preserve populations of predators. While it is not clear that predation increases the total amount of suffering in nature (the way that populations would respond in its absence would be worse overall), it is certainly a possibility worth considering, and one which these groups rarely mention. Projects to support populations of predators are mainstream and it would be difficult to list every group that conducts such projects, but for example the include the Humane Society of the United States and Friends of Animals.
Some organizations and advocates work only on behalf of endangered species and the environment, and may not share the other concerns we have mentioned. However, there are also examples of groups such as PETA and Born Free USA which work on both issues of species preservation and other animal issues.
These concerns are mainstream as applied to farm and laboratory animals, where advocates often work to reduce the total number of animals being used in these settings and see a reduction in their numbers as positive, even if it is unaccompanied by an increase in the number of animals in sanctuaries or other settings.
For instance: “The audit reveals that, in 2014, 834,453 animals were used, compared to 891,161 in 2013. This is a reduction of 6%. The new figures are also encouraging because they shows the lowest number of animals used in experimentation on record.” —Faunalytics. (July 21, 2015). Animals Used in Research—2014 USDA Report.
Some advocates are also concerned about how this thinking applies to animals in the wild. For instance:
“AR Zone: Intervention in nature may lead some to make the conclusion that since our primary goal is elimination of suffering, wouldn’t it be the ethical to want to destroy all wildlife (to end all suffering)? What are the arguments against this?
Oscar Horta: Well, your question might sound absurd at first. But when one thinks about it… it’s actually a very hard one! I guess that the only response that question may have is that living is something good because having positive experiences is better than having no experiences at all. However, it’s true that our life may be filled with suffering, and that can be worse than ceasing to exist. That’s why euthanasia exists. So this really is a problem.” —ARZone. (March 19, 2011). Professor Oscar Horta Interview.
“This entry will focus primarily on two questions: first, whether present generations can be duty-bound because of considerations of justice to past and future people; and second, whether other moral considerations should guide those currently alive in relating to both past and future people. Concerning the first question, the entry will suggest that present generations have duties of justice to future people but not to past people. Concerning the second question, the entry will suggest that present generations also have additional moral duties (duties not grounded in correlative rights) to future people as well as moral duties to past people owing, in part, to the rights these people had while alive. The entry will also argue for the lasting significance of past injustices in terms of what is owed to the descendants of the direct victims of the injustices. These are contentious claims as the discussion will show.” —Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2013–2015). Intergenerational Justice.
This is especially contentious in the cases of humans who are thought to have less capacity for rational thought and action than others, such as children. In these cases the two main philosophical underpinnings for the concept of human rights, interests theory and will theory, can lead to different and sometimes surprising conclusions:
“The interests theory approach and the will theory approach contain strengths and weaknesses. When consistently and separately applied to the doctrine of human rights, each approach appears to yield conclusions that may limit or undermine the full force of those rights. It may be that philosophical supporters of human rights need to begin to consider the potential philosophical benefits attainable through combining various themes and elements found within these (and other) philosophical approaches to justifying human rights.” —Fagan, Andrew. Human Rights. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
It’s worth noting that people concerned about wild animal suffering tend not to be certain which interventions really prevent it. For instance, the destruction of habitats leads to additional suffering in the short term, as animals starve, leave their home territory, or are otherwise harmed in the process. However, since animals in the wild may lead lives that are negative on balance, some think that destroying habitats where many animals live and replacing them with habitats which would support smaller overall populations could be beneficial. For instance:
“Caring about wild-animal suffering should not be mistaken as general support for environmental preservation; indeed, in some or even many cases, preventing existence may be the most humane option.” —Tomasik, B. (2015). The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering. Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism, 3(2).
“We have the power to stop animal cruelty at every meal. In fact, the number of animals bred and abused on farms in the U.S. each year has dropped by nearly 500 million. Why? Because individuals like you are choosing to replace animal products with delicious vegan food.
The goal of our education department is to prevent cruelty by inspiring more people to move towards vegan eating.” —Mercy For Animals. Education.
“These calculations suggest that a diet of poultry meat or eggs causes a net increase in the abundance of birds and mammals, relative to plant-based agriculture, on the order of 10 animal life-years per year, per 20 kg of protein. In contrast, a diet of pork, beef, or dairy causes a net decrease in the abundance of animal life-years.” —Matheny, G. and Chan, K.M.A. (2005). Human Diets and Animal Welfare: The Illogic of the Larder. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 18, 579–594.
“Overall, it seems plausible that crop cultivation prevents more insects than it causes, relative to most types of counterfactual land.” —Tomasik, B. (2015). Crop Cultivation and Wild Animals. Essays on Reducing Suffering.
For instance:
“There are reasons to think the best first step toward reducing wild-animal suffering that we can take now is to promote general concern for the issue. Causing more people to think and care about wild-animal suffering will hasten developments in research on wild-animal welfare and associated humane technologies, while at the same time helping to ensure that our advanced descendants think cautiously about actions that would create vastly more suffering organisms.” —Tomasik, B. (2015). The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering. Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism, 3(2).
“There are so many great memories, but the best ones involve tabling all day while showing regular people videos of how animals are treated and seeing them change on the spot. You can see them change right before your eyes!” —Deardorff, E. Meet The Outreach Coordinators. PETA.
“Our vision is a world free of avoidable suffering where animals are given equal consideration regardless of their species.” —ACE. Strategic Plan.
“Social behaviour ranges from simple attraction between individuals to life in complex societies characterized by division of labour, cooperation, altruism, and a great many individuals aiding the reproduction of a relative few.” —Koenig, W. (June 19, 2015). Animal Social Behavior. Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Animal Ethics summarizes the research discussing which animals are conscious: “Given the criteria we have for considering whether a being is conscious, it is reasonable to conclude that vertebrates and a large number of invertebrates are conscious. The clearer cases are those of animals who have a centralized nervous system whose central organ (basically, a brain) has some development. However, there are a number of animals who possess centralized nervous systems whose central organ is not quite developed. In these cases doubts may arise about whether they are conscious or not.” —Animal Ethics. What Beings Are Conscious?
Even if there are not gradations of consciousness, there may be gradations in the intensity of various feelings between species or organisms, as there clearly are gradations of pain and pleasure for individuals.
We use the term “likely” here, but we are not committed to the view that which beings are conscious is an objective fact in the universe. We think it makes sense to think of consciousness as a “definitional category” like Brian Tomasik suggests in his essay, “Dissolving Confusion About Consciousness.” The difference in these two views doesn’t have major implications for this essay, but it could make a significant difference in one’s conclusions when making judgments about how much various beings matter.
In fact, a large proportion of the research on animal sentience simply assumes that the animals being studied feel certain things, then uses that to answer questions relevant to other purposes. Much less of the research is actually intended to explore animals’ cognitive and sensory abilities as such. See Proctor, H. S., Carder, G., & Cornish, A. R. (2013). Searching for animal sentience: a systematic review of the scientific literature. Animals, 3(3), 882-906.
“Animal welfare research: This project will create a framework for measuring the relative welfare of the most commonly farmed animals, incorporating four dimensions: animal’s neurological capacity to experience pain, the extent to which animal’s environment stimulates that capacity, the duration for which animals experience that environment, and the number of animals within that environment. This research, in creating quantifiable terms in which the average welfare of one animal might be compared to another, hopes to inform strategies for maximizing total animal welfare.” —ACE. Planned Research.
This is apparent in summaries of the literature, which give disproportionate space to mammals and especially to primates. “There are as many approaches to studying animal cognition as there are definitions of cognition itself… The diversity is also apparent in the wide range of species to be found between these covers. Of course there are many chapters on primates, and especially the great apes, reflecting our human-centered interest in our closest relatives, but there are also chapters that touch on cognition in animals as diverse as earthworms, antelopes, dogs, spiders, dolphins, bees, fish, hyenas, snakes, sea lions, prairie dogs, virtual organisms, parrots, rats, ravens, and squirrels, to name a few.” —Bekoff, M., Allen, C., & Burghardt, G. M. (2002). The cognitive animal: Empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition. MIT Press
“The nerve structure is an essential criterion for deciding whether a being is conscious, but there are other, additional criteria. On the basis of these alone we wouldn’t be in a position to conclude that a being without a centralized nervous system is conscious; but they provide additional evidence for consciousness in the case of beings who do possess a centralized nervous system.” —Animal Ethics. Criteria for Recognizing Sentience.
“The organization of the nervous system of octopodes and vertebrates is very different, due to differences in their respective evolutionary histories. Still, the complexity in behavior exhibited by octopodes leads to the conclusion that they are conscious beings.” —Animal Ethics. Criteria for Recognizing Sentience.
If we are uncertain whether animals are sentient, we must consider both the possibility that they are and the possibility that they are not. If they are sentient and we assume that they aren’t, we won’t work to protect them from harm as we ought to. If they aren’t sentient and we assume that they are, we may spend excessive resources on helping them, which could be better used in helping animals that actually are sentient. Ideally, we should consider both possibilities when making decisions, as well as encouraging further research so that the question can be settled.
We plan to reconsider this position when we do more research in this area, especially when it comes to creatures with less cognitive complexity than the usual animals raised for food. For example, we think some insects might be less sentient than most mammals, birds, and fish.
Additionally, a cause where problems have cheaper solutions is more tractable than it would be if the problems had only expensive solutions. The same resources will go farther toward solving the problems if the solutions are cheaper to implement. But this is the last concern, because a cheap way of addressing a problem is not very valuable unless it is going to improve the situation.
For instance, campaigns to introduce animals to new habitats, or to eliminate certain animals from existing habitats, have often had unexpected effects. “Gray wolves inhabited most of North America 200 years ago, but they were virtually wiped out of the Lower 48 states in the 19th and early 20th centuries by government-sponsored eradication campaigns, which portrayed them as deadly pests. Only later did scientists realize their importance as a “keystone predator” — an animal that helps regulate the food web by, for instance, keeping grazer populations in check so they don’t eat too many tree seedlings and hinder forest growth.” —McLendon, R. (July 16, 2012). Wolf Politics Raise Hackles in U.S. West. Mother Nature Network.
“Currently, rabbits inhabit around 4 million square kilometres of Australia, stretching from southeast NSW to the WA wheatbelt.
They have adapted to Australia’s diverse environments, establishing themselves in farmland, deserts, grasslands and wet coastal plains, and causing havoc to native flora and fauna.
“Rabbits are very good at finding the seedlings of shrubs when they are very small and grazing them out to the extent where the native shrubs are completely unable to regenerate,” says Mutze.
Rabbits also threaten some of our native burrowing animals, such as the bilby and the burrowing bettong, by moving into their existing burrows and competing for food.” —Zukerman, W. (April 8, 2009). Australia’s Battle with the Bunny. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
For example, PETA emphasizes the problems with predation when discussing reintroducing predators to ecosystems, but the benefits when discussing hunting, suggesting that their position on predation depends on whether it’s already occurring, a very different approach from the one they take to other issues.
“Reintroducing wolves and other predators into an environment that has been free of such animals for a long time is also traumatic for the animals who already live there, such as deer, birds, and any other animals who suddenly find themselves being stalked and attacked.” —PETA. Animal Rights Uncompromised: Predator-Reintroduction Programs.
“Natural predators help keep prey species strong by killing the only ones they can catch—the sick and weak.” —PETA. Without hunting, deer and other animals would overpopulate and die of starvation.
“The only truly humane foods are those that don’t come from animals.” —PETA. The Organic and ‘Free-Range’ Myth.
“In an e-mail message, I described Polyface and asked him about the implications for his position of the Good Farm—one where animals got to live according to their nature and to all appearances did not suffer.
“I agree with you that it is better for these animals to have lived and died than not to have lived at all,” Singer wrote back. Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering and the slaughter of an animal that doesn’t comprehend that death need not involve suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. However, he added, this line of thinking doesn’t obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that ‘has a sense of its own existence over time and can have preferences for its own future.'” —Pollan, M. (November 10, 2002). An Animal’s Place. The New York Times Magazine.
Most animal advocates still believe that farming is negative for animals on balance, but some, such as one commenter on the piece quoted below, think that in addition to ending farming it would be morally obligatory to continue supporting animals on sanctuaries. “If there were no money in farm animals anymore, the meat and dairy industry wouldn’t bother breeding and feeding them either. That makes sense, and is likely a reality we would have to face.
Not breeding such extreme numbers, the animal population would definitely dwindle into smaller numbers.
Some animals could make it in the wild, while others couldn’t. To those lucky enough to be released, at least they’d have a chance compared with none at all.
Most, though, would probably be killed.” —Karlsen, S. Will Animals Go Extinct If the World Becomes Vegan? Ethical Vegan.
For instance, many animal advocates adopt slogans similar to PETA’s “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way,” while others take positions more like Compassion in World Farming’s “Farmed animals should not, and need not, suffer,” and envision a world with some animal agriculture which is truly humane. While some actions make progress toward both goals, the fact that there are different goals at all tends to divert energy towards disagreements between advocates.
“Of the dogs entering shelters, approximately 35% are adopted, 31% are euthanized and 26% of dogs who came in as strays are returned to their owner.
Of the cats entering shelters, approximately 37% are adopted, 41% are euthanized, and less than 5% of cats who came in as strays are returned to their owners.” —ASPCA. Shelter Intake and Surrender: Pet Statistics.
For instance: “The single most important thing that we can do to save cats and dogs from all the suffering and death that their overpopulation causes is to spay and neuter them.” —PETA. Spay and Neuter.
“American Humane Association believes that all cats and dogs adopted from public or private animal care and control facilities should be spayed or neutered (i.e., sterilized). Such sterilization includes prepubertal spaying and neutering of kittens and puppies. American Humane Association supports the passage of laws and regulations mandating that all cats and dogs adopted from public or private animal care and control facilities be sterilized.” —American Humane Association. Spaying/Neutering.
“One way to start putting an end to pet overpopulation is to adopt your next pet from your local shelter or breed rescue group. By doing so you immediately give a home to an animal that didn’t have one, and you reduce the overall number of homeless pets out there.” —American Humane Association. Adoption & Pet Care.
“Most animal shelters and rescue organizations run on donations and could always use money. Help them out by holding a fundraiser to benefit them!” —Humane Society of the United States. Help Homeless Pets: Hold a Fundraiser.
“In the 1970s, shelters in America euthanized 12-20 million dogs and cats when there were 67 million in people’s homes. Today, we euthanize around 4 million animals while there are more than 135 million dogs and cats in people’s homes. From perhaps 25 percent of dogs and cats in America euthanized every year, to about three percent—that’s major progress for animals.” —Pacelle, W. (November 8, 2007). Setting Aside Semantics: Not Killing Pets Must Be Our Goal. A Humane Nation.
Cognitive biases such as the Dunning-Kruger effect and the planning fallacy tend to cause people to overestimate their skill at tasks they are bad at and underestimate the time needed for activities they haven’t tried. When something hasn’t been attempted at all, these biases are especially important to consider, because it’s harder to correct for them using prior experience.
“SIT is a species-specific and environmentally nonpolluting method of insect control that relies on the release of large numbers of sterile insects (Knipling 1955, 1979, 1998, Krafsur 1998, Dyck et al., 2005a). Mating of released sterile males with native females leads to a decrease in the females’ reproductive potential and ultimately, if males are released in sufficient numbers over a sufficient period of time, to the local elimination or suppression of the pest population.” —Alphey, L.,et. al. (2010). Sterile-Insect Methods for Control of Mosquito-Borne Diseases: An Analysis. Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, 10(3), 295–311.
Because the sterile insect technique controls populations by reducing the number of insects born in generations after the sterile insects are released, it avoids concerns about pain caused by methods that kill insects which are already living.
For instance, DDT was widely used as an insecticide for many years before people noticed and responded to its effects on other wildlife. “The reason why DDT was so widely used was because it is effective, relatively inexpensive to manufacture, and lasts a long time in the environment (2)…. DDT was canceled because it persists in the environment, accumulates in fatty tissues, and can cause adverse health effects on wildlife (5).” National Pesticide Information Center. (December 1999). DDT General Fact Sheet.
An overall analysis of sterile insect technique for mosquito populations acknowledges these concerns, but provides no references addressing them:
“In our experience, most questions from people outside of insect control and allied disciplines, including lay members of the public in potential release areas, relate much more to ecosystem consequences than to human health. Thus, what are the ecological consequences of suppressing or removing a pest? Again this is clearly a “what if the program succeeds” question.
This is something that needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis.” —Alphey, L.,et. al. (2010). Sterile-Insect Methods for Control of Mosquito-Borne Diseases: An Analysis. Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, 10(3), 295–311.
“Pearce argues that we should strive to “eradicate suffering in all sentient life”—a project which he describes as “technically feasible” thanks to genetic engineering and nanotechnology, and “ethically mandatory” on utilitarian grounds.” —Power, K. (2006). The End of Suffering. Philosophy Now.
If people are acting rationally, the first funding in an area, or funding that will definitely be allocated to that area, will go to the projects which are most efficient or most important to do first. Further funding will be used for projects which are less important or efficient, unless there is enough of it to provide economies of scale or other opportunities which were not available with the original level of funding.
In practice, when a cause area receives a lot of funding, new marginal funding is likely to be less effective than the average dollar spent on that cause, because good opportunities will already be taken and what remains will be projects that were previously passed over as less efficient uses of funding. When a cause area receives a small amount of funding, new marginal funding may be at least as efficient as the average dollar spent on the cause, if it is still being used for the most efficient projects or if it allows advocates to take on projects which will be efficient but which can only be done at larger scales.
For instance, PAWS Chicago provides information on the size of their spay/neuter and adoption programs over many years. While their adoption program has been growing steadily, the spay/neuter program has been fairly consistent in size since around 2011. PAWS writes thoughtfully about their comprehensive model for reducing shelter euthanasia in Chicago and acknowledges the high returns to spay/neuter surgeries, so we believe the reason that program is now so consistent in size is serving most of the need in their area. —PAWS Chicago. PAWS Chicago’s Progression.
We estimate that our Top Charities help many more animals per donation than typical companion animal shelters do (see here), and all of them have room for more funding to expand their programs. We would also expect other farm animal advocacy groups to be more similar in effectiveness to our top charities than to animal shelters, since much of the difference in effectiveness is due to the type of programs organizations run, rather than to unique organizational characteristics
For instance, rabies and overpopulation are more common problems for dogs in India than in the U.S. Vaccination and spay/neuter programs there need funding more than similar programs in the U.S. —Help Animals India. Frequently Asked Questions.
For a similar approach to a variety of causes mostly outside ACE’s scope, see the following post from 80,000 Hours:—Todd, B. (January 21, 2014). Which Cause is Most Effective? 80,000 Hours.
Above, we estimated that there are fewer than a billion companion animals in distress, compared to over 30 billion farmed animals and at least 10 trillion wild animals. See the section on Importance.
“For every one dog or cat euthanized in a shelter, about 2600 farmed animals are confined and slaughtered. … As of 2013, Charity Navigator listed 80 major U.S. animal shelters with budgets over $3.5 million, together endowed with $835 million. By contrast, 9 major U.S. farm animal outreach organizations together controlled just $16 million.” —ACE. Number of Animals Vs. Amount of Donations.
Of course, caring for individual animals is in some sense not routine, as each animal may have different problems and needs. Still, companion animal care is well-developed in many areas, with local organizations caring for animals in similar ways in many areas. In fact, such organizations make up a large part of the animal charity sector overall. “Because most of the smaller organizations reviewed on Charity Navigator were local shelter-based organizations, we expect that not reviewing the local charities with budgets smaller than $3.5 million led to an underestimate of how much funding overall was directed towards shelters.” —ACE. Number of Animals Vs. Amount of Donations.
Above, we estimated that there are around 10 trillion wild vertebrates and even more wild invertebrates, compared to about 30 billion farmed animals and fewer animals in other categories. See the section on Importance.
One of our standout charities, Animal Ethics, does advocate for wild animals from a perspective that primarily values individual experience. For more, see our Animal Ethics Review.
For instance, the Humane Society of the United States operates a Wildlife Land Trust designed to protect habitats for all types of animals: “The Humane Society Wildlife Land Trust celebrates and protects wild animals by creating permanent sanctuaries, preserving and enhancing natural habitat and confronting cruelty.” —Wildlife Land Trust. About Us.
For instance, the World Wildlife Fund says, “Our biggest goal is to save wildlife. We will achieve this by focusing on populations of the most ecologically, economically and culturally important species in the wild. These are what WWF calls our flagship species, the iconic animals that serve as ambassadors for conservation.” —World Wildlife Fund. Wildlife Conservation.
Preserving members of a specific species could be bad if that species has predominantly negative effects on other animals, for example if it is a predatory species whose prey would be better off without its presence. “Just as we may be able to alleviate the suffering caused to wild animals by disease or natural disasters, we might also be able to do something about predation and the often-brutal competition that permeates the natural food chain.” —MacAskill, A. and MacAskill, W. (September 9, 2015). To Truly End Animal Suffering, the Most Ethical Choice Is To Kill Wild Predators (Especially Cecil the Lion). Quartz.
Another way that preserving species could be bad for animals is that animals of the species being preserved could themselves have net negative lives. This is a lesser concern in practice, because specific species being preserved are usually larger, longer-lived species, while the animals whose lives are most likely to be net negative seem to be small animals with very short lives. “This is because most of the animals that live in nature are small (e.g., minnows and insects). The adults of these species live at most a few years, often just a few months or weeks, so it is hard in these cases for the happiness of life to outweigh the pain of death. Moreover, almost all the babies of these species die (possibly painfully) after just a few days or weeks of being born.” —Tomasik, B. (2015). The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering. Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism, 3(2).
“Humans presently lack the knowledge and technical ability to seriously “solve” the problem of wild-animal suffering without potentially disastrous consequences. However, this may not be the case in the future, as people develop a deeper understanding of ecology and welfare assessment.” —Tomasik, B. (2015). The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering. Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism, 3(2).
Some are concerned that even cautious methods like educational outreach could do more harm than good in some circumstances. “There may be a danger here of raising the wild-animal issue before the general public is ready. Indeed, the cruelty of nature is often used as a reductio by meat-eaters against consequentialist vegetarianism. Suggesting that ethical consideration for animals could require us to expend resources toward long-term research aimed at helping wildlife might turn off entirely people who would otherwise have given some consideration to at least those animals that they affect through dietary choices (Greger 2005). ” —Tomasik, B. (2015). The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering. Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism, 3(2).
This is particularly evident in thinking that implies an situation can have moral weight only if it is caused by an actor who can be expected to think in terms of good or bad actions. For instance:
“The judgment calls of “good” and “bad” are human judgments. The answer is no more that “just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s bad”—the answer is that it is nature, and it is neither.” —Matthews, S. (December 16, 2015). Nature Can’t Exist Without Suffering—And We Can’t Change That. Audubon.
For instance, Animal Ethics, one of few groups that considers wild animal suffering from a similar viewpoint to our own, offers modest recommendations for helping animals that mostly focus on raising awareness of speciesism and on promoting research. —Animal Ethics. What You Can Do.
Such research could include both research on how concern for wild animals could be promoted throughout the animal advocacy movement and society, and more technical research on the experiences of animals in the wild and the value of various interventions that could help them.
We think many of the difficulties experienced by GiveWell in evaluating life science research funding as a cause area extend to most research areas. In addition, much of the research which could be relevant to helping wild animals would come from within the life sciences. “But scientific research is distinguished from other fields I’ve investigated by the degree to which expertise (often in the form of understanding a very specific, near-universal knowledge base that requires extended study to absorb) is a prerequisite to understanding the basics of what people are claiming and how one might reasonably go about comparing and drilling down on claims. Therefore, we chose to pause further investigation of scientific research until we recruit an appropriate set of generalist scientific advisors.” —Karnofsky, H. (January 7, 2014). Exploring Life Sciences Funding. The GiveWell Blog.
Above, we estimated that there are around 10 trillion wild vertebrates and even more wild invertebrates, compared to about 30 billion farmed animals and around 1 billion animals in other categories. See the section on Importance.
Most of our Top and Standout Charities work primarily on farm animal issues. Successes in the area range from spreading awareness through protests, individual outreach and mass media, to corporate and legislative policy changes. Corporate and legislative policy changes are the most easily documented accomplishments, and many are listed on the following page. —Humane Society of the United States. Major Advances in Farm Animal Protection.
Advocacy efforts so far have focused mainly on banning the most obviously cruel farming practices and on persuading the most receptive people to become activists or change their diet. It seems likely that addressing other farming practices or other groups of people will eventually require new methods.
Animal agriculture deliberately organizes resistance to animal advocates’ work in this field. For instance, “The [Animal Agriculture] Alliance monitors the activities of these activist groups and seeks to proactively engage in the same areas they target to correct misinformation and tell the true story of agriculture.” —Animal Agriculture Alliance. Animal Rights.
“As of 2013, Charity Navigator listed 80 major U.S. animal shelters with budgets over $3.5 million, together endowed with $835 million. By contrast, 9 major U.S. farm animal outreach organizations together controlled just $16 million.” —ACE. Number of Animals Vs. Amount of Donations.
Most of our Top and Standout Charities work primarily on farm animal issues. Successes in the area range from spreading awareness through protests, individual outreach and mass media, to corporate and legislative policy changes. Corporate and legislative policy changes are the most easily documented accomplishments, and many are listed on the following page. —Humane Society of the United States. Major Advances in Farm Animal Protection.
In 2015, we found that every organization on which we conducted a medium or deep review had room for additional funding beyond what they expected to receive in the coming year. Most of these organizations do substantial work on farm animal advocacy. —Bockman, J. (December 1, 2015). Updated Recommendations: December 2015. ACE Blog.
“The field of animal advocacy has historically suffered from a lack of research attention. As a result, in our research ACE continually encounters questions not addressed directly by existing studies…. On this page we list ideas for studies that we believe would provide useful information, but that we do not have the capability to conduct in the near future. We hope that researchers interested in improving the lives of animals will consider conducting these or related studies.” —ACE. Research Proposals.
Above, we estimated that there are about 100 million lab animals and 1 billion companion animals, with many more farm and wild animals. But many companion animals live in situations of relative comfort. See the section on Importance.
For instance, the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments has successfully banned animal testing of cosmetics and cosmetic ingredients in the E.U.
In the U.S., general animal advocacy groups and groups specifically organized to oppose animal testing publish guides to help consumers avoid products that have been tested on animals and have convinced specific companies and schools to stop using animals for testing and education. —ACE. Animals Used in Research.
As with advocacy for farmed animals, advocacy against animal testing has often addressed the cruelest practices, such as vivisection, or those which are easiest to abandon, such as testing cosmetics. Many kinds of medical and basic scientific research are still conducted on animals, with few indications that animal advocates have found persuasive ways to present alternatives that will replace the use of animals in those settings. This does not mean that animal testing in those circumstances cannot be stopped, but that advocates may need to find new approaches in order to effectively end these types of testing.
In particular, while we can hope to reduce our reliance on animal testing that is done in order to understand how human physiology works or how medications will work on humans, it seems unlikely that we can eliminate animal testing entirely without reducing our ability to learn about nonhuman animals themselves and medications or other interventions that may improve their lives.
In our survey of the animal charity field, we found that laboratory animal groups received less funding than farm animal advocacy groups and far less funding than companion animal advocacy groups. —ACE. Number of Animals Vs. Amount of Donations.
Most of the best opportunities to help animals, such as influencing corporate and government policy and educating the public, are likely to be especially cost-effective when the populations of animals that they affect are larger. In contrast, sanctuary or rescue operations’ cost-effectiveness does not vary as much based on the size of the population being served, but these are not usually the most efficient ways to affect large numbers of animals.
There may be another exception for work that is likely to have especially large positive spillover effects on other groups of animals. For instance, work that focuses on securing legal rights for animals or on promoting a message of antispeciesism may be unusually effective because of its clear messages outside the immediate problem being addressed. However, we think spillover effects are usually especially difficult to understand well, and attempts to take them into account are very vulnerable to the halo effect (which causes us to see things with one good property as also having other good properties). We wouldn’t currently feel comfortable deciding that a project was especially effective based primarily on its spillover effects.
While our largest impact in terms of directing donations may be through directing the donations of a few individuals donating relatively large amounts of money, these are donations to existing organizations which mostly don’t seek to substantially change the direction of the organizations’ efforts.
ACE offers specific advice to animal advocacy groups on request. We also provide general advice online and through conference talks.
We update our list of organizations regularly. Currently, we recommend Animal Ethics as a standout charity in part because they are the most promising organization working on wild animal issues from a perspective similar to our own.
See for instance our page on wild animal suffering, or this blog post by guest blogger Oscar Horta.
For instance, we cover these areas in our advice for volunteers, and we have reviewed charities working in these areas at low levels of detail.

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