The animal rights movement was once locked in bitter debate. Now it’s getting things done.

A calf on a dairy farm in Canada. | Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media

It’s one of those facts of the world that most people know but don’t really want to know: Billions of animals on factory farms live their lives in gruesome and torturous conditions so that our eggs and meat are a bit cheaper. Virtually no one really approves of it, but almost everyone participates in it.

If you want to change that, what should you do about it?

When I was in college, activists for animals had some passionate disagreements about which approach to take. A lot of them favored leafleting — handing out flyers with grotesque pictures of the horrifying conditions on factory farms, with the idea of shocking people into change. Others favored protests in restaurants and grocery stores, or daring rescues of dying animals from confinement. Some people hoped we could obviate meat altogether with plant-based or lab-grown alternatives, while others wanted to work towards gradual legislative change. 

One division was between people who called themselves animal rights activists — working toward a world where we did not treat nonhuman animals as property, but acknowledged them as individuals — and people who called themselves animal welfare activists, and who tended to favor interventions to make the processes by which we raised and killed animals for food more humane. 

EAs versus activists

The growing effective-altruism-inspired giving to animal advocacy tended to come down on the animal welfare side of the spectrum. 

Consider lobbying to make a factory farm slightly more humane, even as it still subjects animals to awful conditions. Many animal rights activists feel like that amounts to complicity in the abuses that even supposedly more humane farms would go on to perpetuate. 

Effective altruists, by contrast, tended to jump at such opportunities — after all, 10 percent better conditions for animals, while hardly perfect, is still better. Many sanctuaries for rescued farm animals were bitter about effective animal advocates’ disinterest in funding them; effective animal advocates, in turn, would grimly observe that sanctuaries simply don’t have that many animals in them, compared to the number in factory farms. It was a matter of numbers.

There was also a difference in ethos. Faced with an atrocity, some people are drawn to splash themselves with blood and march down the street, trying to make passersby realize the magnitude of the horrors they’re complicit in. Other people are inclined to whip out some spreadsheets. These two groups often end up suspicious of each other, each exasperated to have allies who refuse to do what it takes.

One could write an entire book about the culture clashes as effective altruism-oriented giving entered the animal advocacy space. Effective altruists were also making a splash in other areas, like global health and development or biosecurity or AI, but those were all areas where a lot of money was already being spent from many sources. Farmed animal advocacy, by contrast, was not. 

Effective animal advocates rapidly became a huge source of spending in the space, and their philosophy of how to do good became prominent. That understandably led to frustration from people with other theories of how to do good, theories they’d often spent decades working on with very little funding.

But ultimately almost everyone involved should agree the effective animal advocacy movement should be evaluated not by how they made humans feel, but by how their work impacted animals.

Stronger together

A decade on, the philosophy of incremental and numbers-oriented welfare work has gotten a lot done. 

One recent blog post published by the Open Philanthropy Project, which has funded effective animal advocacy work, lays out how they did it. The Open Wing Alliance, a coalition of animal advocacy organizations, zeroed in on corporations as a good target for pressure to improve conditions. Since these corporations tend to sell eggs to consumers, they care about their reputation. 

The Open Wing Alliance would effectively offer them a deal: commit to going cage-free, or else: “Protesters will mobilize online and on the ground; they’ll show up in chicken costumes at corporate headquarters and franchise locations. Public ads and social media shame campaigns will further drive negative press. The OWA … will do its best to make [the target’s] brand synonymous with animal cruelty if they refuse to make necessary welfare improvements.”

In an important way, this represents a synthesis of the two threads of the animal advocacy movement that I encountered back when I was a college student: the suit-wearing lobbying types get the meetings with corporations, and make demands carefully chosen based on rigorous analysis of which asks do the most for animals. But the corporations’ reason to go along is that should they refuse, they will face protesters willing to put their bodies on the line for animals. 

It’s proven to be a very powerful tactic. Hundreds of pledges have been made, and broadly, they’ve been kept. Hundreds of millions of chickens live lives that are still pretty horrifying, but still significantly better than they’d otherwise have been — one estimate concluded that compared to a hen raised in a cage, each hen raised cage-free will spend 275 fewer hours in “disabling pain,” and thousands of hours less time in lower levels of pain. 

No one is declaring victory, but it seems like the negotiation-and-threat-of-protests strategy is a highly cost-effective way to improve conditions for animals. 

The road ahead

Of course, it’s impossible to imagine fully addressing the horrors of factory farming with this approach — or with any single approach. Corporations will change their policies if it’s relatively inexpensive to do so, but it’s hard to imagine them adopting the much more expensive changes that would be necessary to give animals intensively raised on factory farms good lives. And plenty of animal advocates wouldn’t be happy even if you did pull that off; they’d like us to stop raising billions of animals in captivity to kill and eat, not just to be nicer about doing so. 

And the most unpleasant feature of factory farming is that, unlike nearly all of the world’s problems, so far it has gotten worse as the world has gotten richer. As more and more people enter the global middle class and can afford cheap meat, it creates incentives for more companies to horrendously mistreat animals. For all the progress I’ve discussed, more animals in the US are factory farmed now than when I was in college. 

On a problem as big as this one, you can accomplish a ton and still have an unfathomable distance to go. 

But when I look at the state of animal advocacy in 2024, I’m optimistic. Since a decade ago, there’s been a serious maturation of the field. It has integrated the many varying perspectives on what advocates are trying to achieve, and somewhat grown past the frictions of very different people trying to work together toward a common goal. And people have accomplished real and worthy things, and learned a lot about what works. 

The stakes remain enormous and the situation remains stomach-churningly terrible, but many of the arguments I remember having in college are ones that the movement has now substantially moved past. Disruptive protests or polished advocacy? Why not one as a strategy to produce the other, like how labor unions do it? Is it worth advocating for incremental change? Looks like, yes, it definitely is. Do people from different subcultures and with different perspectives really care about animals, despite all the mutual distrust? Looks like, yes, they do!

At the same time, I’ve seen many other advocacy groups run aground on such differences. It’s worth occasionally taking a step back to be impressed with the achievements of animal advocates — and, if you work on any other high-stakes depressingly entrenched ill in our world, to learn from them.