Why I Donate to Vegan Outreach
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.
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....
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]
animal rightscan have value as well. The key is to emphasize that animal suffering is bad in any context, not just specific cases in which humans happen to be responsible for the harm. This seems likely to move people in the direction of caring about wild animals most rapidly, and it also helps ensure that our descendants will have the right responses to novel decisions about animal well-being that we can't anticipate today. Several Spanish and South-American animal organizations have a more focused anti-speciesist message than most US charities, and some of their members have come to agree that wild-animal suffering matters. I recommend that US animal charities follow in this direction.