Giving Compass' Take:

• Animal Charity Evaluators argues that animal welfare donations are inconsistent with effective giving and that more funds need to flow to ending factory farming. 

• Are your animal welfare donations doing the most good that they can? How could you adjust your strategy to improve the lives of more animals? 

• Learn more about effective animal welfare interventions. 

Animal suffering in our world is diverse and immense. But the magnitude of human-caused animal suffering inflicted on farmed animals dwarfs all other categories. For every one dog or cat euthanized in a shelter, about 3,400 farmed animals are confined and slaughtered. Of the 9.2 billion farmed animals killed in 2015 in just the U.S., 8.8 billion were chickens, according to latest slaughter totals. This amounts to 279 chickens killed per second. An additional 13 other farmed animals were killed per second in 2015, twenty-one times the total amount of lab animals confined. All these numbers are for the U.S. alone.

Spending on animal advocacy is highly inconsistent with these patterns. As of 2015, Charity Navigator listed 90 major U.S. animal shelters with budgets over $3.5 million, together endowed with $1.2 billion. By contrast, 10 major U.S. farmed animal outreach organizations together controlled just $19.9 million.

These numbers together suggest that typical donors and volunteers should concentrate their efforts on preventing the suffering of as many factory farmed animals as possible.

Read the full article about focusing on farmed animals at Animal Charity Evaluators.