Summary. I think Vegan Outreach is among the best public US charities for people who want to prevent large amounts of suffering. The immediate cruelty prevented is emotionally compelling: Each dollar donated prevents between 100 days and 51 years of misery on a factory farm. However, the more important impact of Vegan Outreach's work is to raise general awareness of the seriousness of suffering, specifically that of animals. Eventually, in the far future, I hope this will translate into concern over the untold billions of creatures that suffer silently, out of sight and out of mind, in the wild.

Notes. I also recommend The Humane League, which does similar work. Also, if you give to Vegan Outreach, consider asking them to use your funds to pay for highly efficient online veg ads. This is what I am currently doing with my donations to Vegan Outreach.

For compelling on-the-ground accounts of people affected by Vegan Outreach's work, take a look at the Feedback page.

Unexploited Returns

Animals can feel pain, and the amount of non-human animal suffering in the world dwarfs that of humans. However, because most humans care more about human suffering than an equal amount of animal suffering, the bulk of our charitable resources go to help other humans. Given the disproportionate attention paid to human pain, we should expect a priori that we could achieve higher unexploited returns from charitable activities directed toward animals. Indeed, this appears to be the case in practice.

Good health-care interventions in the developing world prevent a year's worth of human suffering (DALY) for a few hundred dollars, perhaps under $100 in the best cases. This is excellent, and it shows just how valuable money is. Before buying, say, a meal at a fancy restaurant, we should think twice about the suffering we could be preventing with the same amount of money. That said, helping animals is even cheaper: In How Much Is A Dollar Worth? The Case of Vegan Outreach, I estimate that we can prevent a year of direct animal suffering on factory farms for between $0.02 and $3.65 (see the table on page 1). That piece evaluated the cost-effectiveness of handing out brochures, but I think it's even more efficient to run online ads about factory farming.

Wild-Animal Welfare

The lives of the 24 billion farm animals on land at any given moment are tragic. However, even this number pales by comparison to the amount of pain that occurs in the wild. It's comforting to say that all suffering in nature is out of our control, but this is decidedly untrue: Even minor decisions about which ecosystems to preserve, which to destroy, and which to modify have massive repercussions for billions of small animals whose existence we will either cause or prevent. Furthermore, if humans develop advanced technological capability, they might expand wild suffering orders of magnitude above its current level, such as by engaging in terraforming, directed panspermia, or sentient simulations. I therefore see it as crucial to spread concern for animal suffering, so that societies of the future will give more ethical weight to animals in their calculations and will think twice before expanding ecosystems full of creatures with short lives and painful deaths.

It's quite possible that the most efficient way to promote the meme that wild-animal suffering matters is to speak about it directly. However, there aren't currently any US public charities engaged in this task. In contrast, there are established, proven, and highly effective organizations which raise awareness generally about animal cruelty. Vegan Outreach is my personal choice, although there are others like The Humane League and Mercy for Animals that do excellent work as well. My hope is that the seeds of empathy that are planted by these groups will ultimately expand to encompass animals in the wild, even those animals whose suffering is in no way our fault. For many people, starting out with a message that wild animals deserve ethical consideration would be a reductio against the whole enterprise of animal welfare; in contrast, such appeals should be harder to reject for welfarist vegetarians, whose eating practices already set the precedent that there are some animal lives so bad that they're best prevented.

Concerns

On balance, I think donating to one of the above organizations is near the most cost-effective use of money for someone who wants to prevent suffering, even purely from a long-term perspective. That said, there are a few points that trouble me.

• All of these organizations use environmental arguments in their literature. Because I think environmental preservation may cause net animal suffering, I worry when these groups endorse the common assumption that preserving animal habitats is an unequivocally good thing. I would prefer that Vegan Outreach and its kin simply refrain from mentioning the issue. That said, I appreciate the fact that Vegan Outreach maintains animal cruelty as its number-one argument, without resorting purely to environmental or health claims. For me, "vegetarianism" is essentially irrelevant; it's the "animal suffering" message that matters. (Note: This is also the reason why I much prefer vegetarian outreach over promotion of in-vitro meat. While artificial meat may prevent lots of factory-farmed brutality, it likely will do little to change social attitudes toward animal suffering per se. But the latter is the whole point, in my mind.)
• All vegetarian organizations face the problem that their cause may in some cases be diluted to the extent that people change their meat-consumption distribution without eliminating meat. Often, people place "vegetarianism" in a close mental category with "only eating fish and/or chicken and/or eggs." However, those are precisely the worst food choices from the perspective of direct factory-farmed suffering. According to the figures in How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods?, one former beef-eater who switches to chicken does as much damage as ~38 meat eaters who continue to consume just beef. Fortunately, Vegan Outreach recognizes this as well (with is part of the reason it eschews excessive focus on global-warming arguments), although for PR reasons, it can't adopt an "eat more beef" campaign....
• In some cases, vegans are the people most ideologically opposed to suggestions of changing the natural world in order to alleviate the massive amounts of suffering that it contains. Browsing just a few of many forum discussions on this topic brings that point home. I hope that Vegan Outreach's effect will primarily be to nurture welfarist sentiments among those it reaches, but I don't doubt that some fraction of those inspired by its literature will go on to become advocates for keeping nature as it's supposed to be. (Except when it comes to things like smallpox or hurricanes or novacaine, in which case they say we shouldn't let nature take its course!)^[1]