ACE’s List of Farmed Animal Advocacy Organizations
A few years ago, the Programs team at Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) assembled a long list of charities to select from when considering which charities to invite for evaluation. This is a list of all farmed animal advocacy organizations around the world that we are aware of, collated from existing directories such as the World Federation for Animals Directory.
More recently, ACE has also used this list to help estimate the neglectedness of farmed animal advocacy within each country, which informs our Impact Potential assessment for the charities we evaluate.
ACE’s List of Farmed Animal Advocacy Organizations
A public version of the list is saved here—we encourage others in the movement to use it as they find fit. It comprises a list of farmed animal advocacy charities around the world and a provisional estimate of the number of farmed animal advocacy charities per country. The list is not exhaustive, and we expect it will contain some significant omissions. We plan to continue updating this list, so we welcome suggestions for additional charities to include and for any other relevant sources of information.
ACE also evaluates charities that focus on wild animal welfare (of which there are very few), but this list solely includes farmed animal advocacy charities.
N.B. The charities listed are not necessarily endorsed by ACE, and each charity may or may not agree with ACE’s mission or methods.
Inclusion criteria
The charities included in this list appear to dedicate a significant proportion of their resources to farmed animal advocacy. This includes charities that primarily focus on other areas (e.g., animals used for entertainment, companion animals, or environmental conservation). In practice, “a significant proportion” is difficult to define and assess, so this list is inevitably somewhat subjective.
This list also includes organizations offering direct help to farmed animals (for example, by providing veterinary care and shelter for rescued farmed animals), where these appear to dedicate a significant proportion of their resources to broader efforts to change public opinion, policy, or industry practices related to farmed animals. Again, this interpretation is bound to be somewhat subjective, and we welcome suggestions for additional charities to include.
Highlights
Based on this list, when accounting for headquarters and subsidiaries, the global distribution of farmed animal advocacy organizations meeting our inclusion criteria is set out in the figure below.
The ten countries with the highest number of farmed animal advocacy organizations that we are aware of are:
- United States (285 organizations)
- United Kingdom (96 organizations)
- Germany (70 organizations)
- Australia (50 organizations)
- Canada (47 organizations)
- India (45 organizations)
- France (39 organizations)
- Brazil (36 organizations)
- Netherlands (34 organizations)
- China (33 organizations)
There are 75 countries where we currently have no record of farmed animal advocacy organizations that meet our inclusion criteria. The ten largest of these countries, by human population, are:
- Sudan
- Algeria
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
- Uzbekistan
- Mozambique
- Madagascar
- Burkina Faso
- Malawi
- Chad
Sources used
- 50by40 members
- Animal Advocacy Africa participants
- Animal Advocacy Careers job board
- Animal Rights Map
- Aquatic Animal Alliance members
- Asia for Animals Coalition
- Charity Entrepreneurship incubated charities
- EA Animal Welfare Fund recipients
- Eurogroup for Animals members
- Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations members
- Greenbaum Foundation grantees
- Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare grant recipients
- Open Wing Alliance members
- ProVeg grant recipients
- World Federation for Animals Directory
Why aren’t you including all the farm animal sanctuaries? These organizations are ambassadors for farm animals, teaching how extraordinary they are, advocating for vegetarianism, veganism, climate change issues, teaching kindness to farm animals, teaching the cruelty of factory farming, indirectly teaching the effects of meat diets on human health. They certainly seem to deserve inclusion in a list of farm animal charities.
Hi Harold, thanks for the question! We agree that farmed animal sanctuaries do great work and we really respect the people running them. We think that sanctuaries probably do the most good through their educational and advocacy work, as this is likely to be much less resource-intensive and more far-reaching than the direct care they provide. We’ve therefore included sanctuaries in this list who seem to devote most of their resources to that broader advocacy work. We’re bound to have missed some off, so we really welcome any suggestions. (It’s a few years old now, but we’ve written about sanctuaries in this blog post: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/the-value-of-sanctuaries-and-how-to-maximize-their-impact.)
This is such an incredibly useful resource, thank you!!
Hi Sofia! No problem, great to hear that you’ve found this helpful!
Dear Max
I hope you are well.
I’m currently creating a list of all large UK animal welfare organisations with a view to creating a huge single network of support to generate a single massive petition which can be presented to partliament/DEFRA with the ultimate aim of a change in the law whereby farm animals have the same legal protection as domestic animals. This will mean a phased process to farms to make the changes needed. I currently have CIWF, VIVA, Animal Aid, Animal World Protection UK, RSCPA and Ed Winters because i think he would be super useful. Any other suggestions please?
Hi Caroline, thanks for getting in touch and for your commitment to helping animals! Some large animal welfare organizations not on your list are The Humane League UK, Anima International UK, Humane Society International UK, Four Paws UK, and Animal Equality. You could also consider getting in touch with the Labour Animal Welfare Society for advice. Given the ambition of your petition, it would also probably be useful to liaise with other animal advocates via a platform such as Hive (https://joinhive.org/) to crowdsource ideas. Best of luck with it!