8. Effective Animal Advocacy

Effective altruism (EA) is a philosophy and social movement that uses evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. The EA approach is about:

(i) The use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximise the good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms, and

(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world. 

This is an ongoing research field that aims to find the best ways of having a social impact, guided by the use of evidence and careful reasoning.

The importance, tractability and neglectedness (ITN) framework is a framework that is used in effective altruism for estimating the value of allocating marginal resources to solving a problem.

• Importance: If we made more progress on this problem, by how much would the world become a better place? We take on large-scale problems.

• Tractability: We work on problems where progress has reasonable, measurable prospects.

• Neglectedness: The best solutions are often not obvious. We concentrate on causes where directing additional resources achieves substantial impact.

Farmed animal welfare is one of the top priority cause areas in effective altruism. Tens of billions of animals are raised and killed by humans for food every year — thus farmed animal suffering is large in scale and important. This is an area in which there is the potential to reduce a great amount of suffering for a large number of individuals if positive action is taken.

A lot of work to date on addressing farmed animal welfare from an EA perspective has been on chickens (farmed for eggs and meat) and fish. These animals are farmed in numbers many times larger than other animals are. Therefore, addressing the welfare of these animals will have a huge overall impact. Many of the interventions have been achieving progress, such as pushing for companies to commit to sourcing cage-free eggs, demonstrating tractability in the work.

While there are a few organisations that have been working on farmed animal advocacy in Asia for many years, this number is still small and neglected as compared to the number of organisations working on other animal protection issues. The farmed animal advocacy movement in Asia is also relatively new and limited compared to that in the western world. There is huge potential for growth. Therefore, farmed animal protection in Asia fits the EA principle of focussing on areas of social change that have been neglected to date.

Besides directly advocating for change through one’s career (i.e. spending time on the cause), we can also choose to give for this cause. Here is a helpful page that shows how donating to farmed animal welfare organisations is an effective use of resources for having a big impact.