Monthly Spotlight – Animal Ethics
Animal Ethics’ work now reaches audiences in 13 languages, available to more than half the world’s population. Its focus is on the neglected but high-impact corners of animal advocacy: wild animal suffering, future risks to animals including the impact of AI, and moral consideration for invertebrates.
This month, we spoke with Aditya Karanam, outreach coordinator at Animal Ethics, one of ACE’s Movement Grants recipients. As he puts it, “an enormous number of sentient beings are suffering in ways the movement pays very little attention to, and wild animals are the clearest example.” A lot of these areas are counterintuitive, he says, which is part of why the movement overlooks them. How Animal Ethics measures impact, the challenges they face, and where they think advocates should be looking next is what we get into below.
Could you introduce Animal Ethics and the core problem your work is trying to solve?
Animal Ethics is an international organization that works to raise moral consideration for all sentient beings, with a particular focus on the harms that animals in the wild go through. We were established in 2012. Most of what we do is advocacy in areas of animal advocacy that are neglected but have a high impact.
The main areas we focus on are:
- Wild animal suffering
- Future risks to nonhuman animals, including the impact of AI on animals
- Moral consideration for invertebrates
- Attitude change more broadly
We do most of this through education, mainly by creating free audiovisual and written content, talks, and courses. We also try to be strategic about who we reach, focusing on the audiences that can have the highest impact:
- The effective altruism community
- The animal advocacy community, which is already working to change social norms
- Gen Z, who will help shape the social norms of the future
- Funders and academics, who have historically played a big role in driving policy change
The core problem we are trying to address is that an enormous number of sentient beings are suffering in ways the movement pays very little attention to, and wild animals are the clearest example of that.
What are some of the biggest wins you’ve had so far?
Given that our work is more movement-building and less corporate or policy-focused,
we have a different scope of achievements:
- We have been at the forefront of raising awareness about wild animal suffering as a cause area. We started this work back in 2018, released an ebook on it, and published one of the first video courses on the topic. Since then, we have given hundreds of talks on wild animal suffering across academic and advocacy platforms and conferences and dozens of courses.
- We released two documentaries: Seantience and AI and Animals, which include interviews with leading thinkers and advocates working in this space. It has helped grow interest in the topic and is now being used as a resource by fellowships and people working on this issue.
- On the academic side, we run courses on animal ethics for educators and academics, including a course for educators in Spain and university courses across several universities in Brazil.
- We have kept giving talks on neglected areas of animal advocacy around the world. In the past couple of years alone, we have given more than 300 talks across these different areas.
- Our website is now available in a total of 13 languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Polish, Italian, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Romanian, Telugu, and Japanese), which are among the most widely spoken in the world and together make the information available to more than half of the global population, over 4 billion people. Our content ranks highly on Google, and we have a strong presence in search. As we make this material available in more languages, we expect it could increasingly feed into AI and future LLM responses as well, which would help make these issues more salient even for people who come to these questions through adjacent topics.
How do you measure the impact of your work, and what does success look like for you?
Because we take a longtermist approach as an organization, it is hard for us to measure our impact directly. A lot of what we do is about changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, and the way they think, to shape social norms, and those things are difficult to measure in a straightforward way.
So we rely on a few proxies:
- How many people engage with our content
- How many views and screenings do our documentaries and videos get
- How many people attend our talks and courses
- How many platforms have we been able to speak on
Success for us looks like people engaging with our ideas and then updating their strategy because of it, whether that is their career, their research, or their organization’s direction, so that neglected areas like wild animal welfare become part of the work they do. Mainly, we want to encourage other advocates and organizations to take these issues seriously, so that more resources and more work go toward animals who are affected on a huge scale. On future risks to animals, we want more advocates thinking about these problems and coming up with projects and interventions that can reduce the greatest harm to future nonhuman sentient beings.
We have started to see this happen in concrete ways. Our advocacy has helped inspire a number of people who now work with organizations like the Center for Wild Animal Welfare and Wild Animal Initiative, and we have heard from many people across the effective altruism community that our work was where they first came across wild animal welfare. That downstream effect, people finding their way into this work, is exactly the kind of change we are aiming for.
What are the most significant challenges you currently face in advancing your mission?
A lot of the areas we work on are counterintuitive, so they need high fidelity messaging for people to really be convinced by them. The movement, though, is already built around the causes that feel most salient, which makes it hard to shift resources toward the more neglected areas.
The biggest challenges are:
- Messaging: These ideas are counterintuitive, so a lot of our effort goes into getting them across in a way that is clear and convincing.
- Animal Ethics runs on very little funding for the amount we try to do, and while more people are starting to work in these areas, it is still tiny compared to what goes into other parts of the movement.
- There is very little attention on regions outside the global north, places like India, China, and Brazil, which have huge populations but where very little of this conversation is happening. We see a lot of opportunities there.
- Published our first module of the course in Hindi
- Gave several talks at Delhi University to both academics and activists
- Presented at animal conferences and worked with organizations like FIAPO, Animal Save India, and AVA India, introducing activists to the course
- Started planning a collaboration with Wild Animal Initiative to give talks to conservationists here as well
- Educate yourselves about these neglected but high-impact areas
- Be forward-looking about the potential risks to animals
- Think about your donations in a way that has the most impact, not just in the near term but in the long term, and not just in the areas the movement already works on but more broadly, where animals are harmed the most
How has the ACE Movement Grant helped strengthen Animals Ethics’ work?
One of our main focuses has been making information about neglected areas, in this case wild animal suffering, more accessible to audiences in different parts of the world. India stands out here. It is one of the most populous countries in the world, and there are already values and narratives there that lead people to pay attention to animals. We really wanted wild animal suffering to be more accessible to that audience, so we translated our video course into Hindi, which is also one of the most widely spoken languages, working with Hindi speakers and volunteers from India. We also plan to host fellowships in several of the colleges we gave the talks to encourage students into the animal advocacy space.
Since then, some of what we have done includes:
So the grant has really helped us make this information available to a global south audience. Previously, ACE had also funded the creation of an e-book and video course on wild animal suffering, which were one of the first centralized resources on this topic. We definitely think more work is needed, and we will keep looking for resources so we can continue expanding our work in India.
If you had to share a final message with the ACE audience, what would it be?
I completely understand why the movement is focused on the interventions it is focused on right now, because we know they work. But there are other areas where a much larger number of animals are affected. I get that people feel the existing interventions are more tractable than these newer areas.
But historically, whenever a new area has shown its importance, it has needed a period of research and capacity building before more tractable interventions could exist. So even though giving talks and running educational courses can seem less measurable, that kind of work has a track record of creating tractability within a cause. Wild animal welfare, marine invertebrates, AI and animals: this is the work that lets more talent and thinking flow into these areas so that real interventions can take shape.
I would also really encourage the movement to think more from a longtermist perspective. We tend to fall into availability bias and focus on what is right in front of us, so we do not spend enough time on the large-scale harms that could come up in the future. With the arrival of AI, for example, a lot of our current strategies may need to be seriously reconsidered. We should be asking whether they would still hold up through the kinds of transformations AI could bring, and whether there are new opportunities we could be taking advantage of. These are the questions that need to be top of mind as we think about where the movement goes next.
So my suggestion for the ACE audience is:
Disclaimer/Note:
The responses in this spotlight were provided by Animal Ethics and reflect the organisation’s own account of their work.
ACE is dedicated to creating a world where all animals can thrive, regardless of their species. We take the guesswork out of supporting animal advocacy by directing funds toward the most impactful charities and programs, based on evidence and research.
