The document outlines the conditions factory farmed animals face, including intensive confinement, health issues, and painful deaths. It notes that while Americans donate over $300 billion annually to domestic causes, less than $50 million goes towards helping farmed animals. Finally, it discusses effective tactics for animal activism, such as online ads, corporate welfare reforms, promoting plant-based foods, undercover investigations, and legal protections for animals.

1. Effective
Animal
Activism

3. Scale

4. Factory farms (virtually all farmed animals):
• Intensive confinement and crowding
• Boredom, frustration, anxiety, and depression
• Dysfunctional relationships
• Parasites, infections, disabilities
• Health complications from breeding
• Some endure painful death before slaughter
• Others witness those animals’ deaths
• Mutilation
• Violence from other confined animals, and farm workers
• Uncomfortable transport to slaughterhouse
• All killed, many by asphyxiation or drowning in boiling water
• Death preceded by the sight, smell, sound of others dying

5. Factory farms (virtually all farmed animals):
• Intensive confinement and crowding
• Boredom, frustration, anxiety, and depression
• Dysfunctional relationships
• Parasites, infections, disabilities
• Health complications from breeding
• Some endure painful death before slaughter
• Others witness those animals’ deaths
• Mutilation
• Violence from other confined animals, and farm workers
• Uncomfortable transport to slaughterhouse
• All killed, many by asphyxiation or drowning in boiling water
• Death preceded by the sight, smell, sound of others dying

6. Factory farms (virtually all farmed animals):
• Intensive confinement and crowding
• Boredom, frustration, anxiety, and depression
• Dysfunctional relationships
• Parasites, infections, disabilities
• Health complications from breeding
• Some endure painful death before slaughter
• Others witness those animals’ deaths
• Mutilation
• Violence from other confined animals, and farm workers
• Uncomfortable transport to slaughterhouse
• All killed, many by asphyxiation or drowning in boiling water
• Death preceded by the sight, smell, sound of others dying

7. Neglectedness
Americans annually donate (total):
$334.36B to Americans (rlg, edu, services, health, env, etc)
$15.10B to international affairs
$2.50B to local animal shelters
$0.02-$0.05B to farmed animals (welfare, veg, sanctuary)

8. Neglectedness
Americans annually donate (per receiving population):
$1,048 in domestic donations per American
<$5 to each human living on <$2.50/day
$36-904 to each homeless companion animal in US
$0.00009- $0.0005 to each animal in factory farm

9. Tractability

10. Online ads ~1-13 years of factory farm suffering spared per €
(High uncertainty)
Farmed animal
interventions:
Leafleting and online
ads to create consumer
changes

11. ~13-28 years of factory farm suffering spared per €
(Less uncertainty; unclear effect on attitudes)
Farmed animal
interventions:
Corporate
welfare reform to reduce
factory farm suffering

12. Farmed animal
interventions:
Animal-free
foods to displace
animal farming

13. Farmed animal
interventions:
Investigations for
public visibility
of farmed animal
suffering

14. Wild Animals

15. An intervention
for all animals:
Legal personhood

16. “we need to end animal farming” v “you need to go veg”
• Focus is more on victim’s needs than abuser’s choices
• Avoids defensiveness & enables moral outrage
• Inspiring vision, rather than demotivating drop in the bucket
• Strongly precedented by successful social movements
• Consumer action still intrinsically, but also politically useful
Messaging tips:
Institutional over
individual framing

17. Messaging tips:
Be kind and professional,
but also bold
Too aggressive
BACKFIRING
Too indulgent
STATUS QUO
Motivating
CHANGE

18. Messaging tips:
Individuals first,
numbers second

19. Messaging tips:
Show not just why,
but how

20. What you can do now
•Join FB group Effective Animal Activism - Discussion.
•Research and discuss. (Write a blog post on the tactics of
a successful or unsuccessful movement.)
•Donate to the orgs with the highest expected value.
(Animal Charity Evaluators’ recommendations, or ACE
itself & Sentience Politics to support research & capacity
building for effectiveness-focused animal advocacy.)
•Consider earning to give for those organizations.
•Look for talent gaps in direct work.

21. Kelly Witwicki
kelly.witwicki@sentience-politics.org