How Do Top Animal Welfare Charities Help 100x as Many Animals as Other Charities?

5 minute read — Published 17th June, 2024

When it comes to helping animals, not all charities are created equal. The most effective charities can help hundreds or even thousands of animals for the same amount of money that others, like dog shelters or animal sanctuaries, can help just one.

That's a pretty bold claim. Let me show you why it is true.

The answer is partly tied to the harsh realities of factory farming. Billions of farmed animals endure immense suffering each year, trapped in intensive factory farm conditions. In the United States alone, 99% of meat comes from these cruel operations,¹ with 1.7 billion animals confined at any given time across 24,000 farms.²

But the intensity of this suffering means that fairly small changes to farming practices can make their lives far better, and the scale of factory farms means that these changes can help many animals at the same time for very little money.

Image courtesy of Renata Valdivia / We Animals Media

Corporate campaigns demonstrate this effect perfectly. Charities we recommend, like Sinergia Animal and The Humane League, work on campaigns to pressure corporations to commit to banning the cruelest practices from their supply chains. These campaigns have secured historic wins, with companies like KFC, Walmart, and Unilever committing to go 100% cage-free for their egg supplies.

These commitments, at a stroke, mean that millions of chickens will avoid living their entire lives in cages with about as much space as an iPad, unable to spread their wings. While their lives will still include much suffering, this is a huge improvement.

These changes can be brought about at a surprisingly low cost. According to one independent estimate, these cage-free campaigns help around 40 chickens per dollar spent,³ making it an incredibly cheap way to help animals compared to the work of other, even very good, charities. In contrast, it costs several thousand dollars to look after a single dog in a shelter for a year.⁴

We've worked with experts in evaluating animal charities, like Animal Charity Evaluators, to identify a number of these super-effective top animal charities that can use your donations to make a big difference for the most animals possible. They work on a range of issues, from introducing humane slaughter methods to ending the cage age and making healthy alternatives to animal products more available.

Each organization is transparent about how they spend their money and committed to trying to accurately measure their success. Their work is independently and expertly evaluated to ensure you can be confident when we say that these organizations help hundreds or thousands more animals per dollar than other charities.

Now, you might wonder if we're suggesting abandoning support for other charities. Far from it.

Many people want to support super-effective charities, but also those that they have a personal connection with (perhaps a charity that addresses a problem they’ve had personal experience with, or a charity in their local community). We don’t think people should have to choose between supporting a personal favorite charity and super-effective farmed animal charities.

FarmKind is designed to help you do what you can for all animals in need of your help. We allow you to split your donation between both a favorite charity, for example a shelter, and some of these super-effective top animal charities. Then, we'll boost your donation to both organizations from our matching fund. Through FarmKind, you can both help the most animals possible and ensure that you can still support the causes closest to your heart.

When it comes to shopping, we want a good deal, and we often shop around and think about how much we can get for our money. By doing the same when it comes to our donations, we can be more caring and do more good than if we don't take the time. Each of us only has a limited amount we can donate, and if we want those donations to go as far as possible, it makes sense to think about how many animals different charities we could donate to can help.

Footnotes

1. Our World in Data (2023): “How many animals are factory-farmed” – “Nearly all livestock animals in the US are factory-farmed”, “...the Sentience Institute has used publicly available data – in this case, published by the USDA Census of Agriculture (number of animals per farm) and Environment Protection Agency (CAFO definitions).. It estimates that 99% of livestock in the US were factory-farmed in 2017”. [↑] 2. Food and Water Watch (2024): “New USDA Data Shows Nearly 50% Increase In U.S. Factory Farmed Animals In 20 Years” – “There are currently 1.7 billion animals living on U.S. factory farms; an increase of 6% since 2017, 47% more than roughly twenty years ago in 2002.” “The U.S. is home to 24 thousand factory farms” [↑] 3. ​Saulius Simcikas (2019): “Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent” – The summary table shows a mean of 42 chickens affected per dollar for cage-free campaigns [↑] 4. Few shelters make the data available to estimate, but Battersea Dogs and Cats Home (one of the UK’s most popular shelters) says it costs them £46,000 a day to look after their animals and that they look after around 7,000 animals a year. [↑]