The Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations

Analysis

Animal Advocacy in India Seems to be Large-Scale, Neglected, and Potentially Tractable

We find supporting farmed animal advocacy work in India to be promising for a number of reasons. India’s population is estimated to be 30–40% vegetarian, and Indians consume relatively little meat per capita, making animal product avoidance a salient and socially acceptable choice. Still, as incomes have risen, Indian demand for animal products—particularly eggs and chicken—has increased; the Indian poultry industry now houses 25 million broiler chickens and 240 million layer hens at any given time. Since we know of few Indian animal advocacy organizations doing potentially effective work, we believe this may also be a relatively neglected area, as well as one that offers plausibly tractable and large-scale opportunities.

There are also some potential difficulties associated with supporting Indian animal advocacy. Indian animal agriculture supply chains are somewhat decentralized—especially in the dairy industry, which is still largely supplied by small-scale farmers.¹² While charities can still make agreements with large-scale distributors, ensuring that welfare standards are met by all of a distributor’s sources may pose a major challenge. Finally, since cows occupy a special place in Hindu culture, organizations and individuals alike may focus on cow welfare at the expense of more numerous or worse-off animals.³

Promising Farmed-Animal Programs

FIAPO organizes and participates in a variety of farmed-animal-focused campaigns. Much of their work involves facilitating local grassroots programs,⁴ but they also investigate farms and campaign for the enactment and enforcement of animal welfare laws. We believe that their anti-farm activities in particular are likely to be effective insofar as they can affect many animals, but we are uncertain how well attempts to increase regulations and enforcement will work in India’s fairly decentralized, difficult-to-regulate agricultural sector.

A significant fraction of FIAPO’s past and current farmed-animal programs are focused on dairy cattle, but the organization also aims to help other farmed animals. In addition to their legal efforts against battery cages, FIAPO runs the Living Free vegan outreach campaign and the Stop Illegal Slaughter campaign, which investigates conditions in many different kinds of meat shops. The Indian egg and broiler industries in particular cause suffering and death for a vast (and growing) number of chickens. We hope to see FIAPO continue to advocate for these numerous and neglected animals.

Concerns about Effectiveness Of Non-Farm-Focused Campaigns

FIAPO sees themselves as “the collective voice of the animal rights movement in India,” so they seek to participate in a wide variety of projects aimed at helping animals. As a result, they put significant effort towards many programs that seem likely to affect relatively small numbers of animals. Examples include their campaign against the bull-taming tradition Jallikattu—which reportedly affects approximately 75,000 animals per year—and their efforts to help the several hundred animals in India’s traveling circuses. It is true that such campaigns may be useful for galvanizing activists and building organizational capacity. However, we believe that FIAPO’s farm-targeted programs are generally more promising, as they have the potential to both build the movement and to help a larger number of animals. Nonetheless, we believe some non-farm-focused FIAPO programs have relatively plausible routes to large-scale impact—for example, their support for a ban on dolphin captivity could provide an important precedent for expanding animal rights in India.

Funding Growth Means Little Room for More Donations At Present

FIAPO’s budget has supported a variety of programs, including some we believe are potentially effective. However, we recommend charities based on what we believe they could do with the donations we would direct to them. FIAPO has enjoyed a rapid increase in funding over the past few years, and they are working to upgrade systems and processes to be able to support their current campaigning needs. At this point the organization is not seeking additional funding, aiming to first stabilize at their current level of funding.⁵ We believe FIAPO has promise, and we will likely be interested in considering them more deeply in the future—once they are more able to make use of additional funding.

1. However, this may change over time; a recent report claims that medium-scale dairy farming is likely to expand at the expense of small-scale and marginal farmers. 

2. In addition to being provided by many small farmers, the Indian dairy supply is spread across many large states. In contrast, the poultry industry appears to be somewhat more concentrated in larger farms which are mostly located in a few states. Per-capita consumption of milk is likewise relatively even across the states, while meat consumption is more concentrated within southern India and the Seven Sister States. 

3. There are also several ways that questions of diversity and discrimination intersect with animal advocacy in India. Different forms of meat consumption are associated with different religious groups and castes, and efforts to fight these behaviors or the related industries should take care not to feed into discrimination or communal conflicts. (In particular, the past few years have seen communal violence and lynchings over Hindus’ claims that Muslims had slaughtered cows or eaten beef.)  

4. Examples include Stop Illegal Slaughter, as well as Do You Buy the Lie, a campaign to raise awareness of poor welfare for dairy cattle and to encourage veganism. 

5. Personal communication with FIAPO Director Varda Mehrotra, July 25, 2017.