July 2019: Animal Welfare Fund Grants

Payout Date: August 24, 2019

Total grants: USD 440,000

Number of grantees: 10

Contents

Introduction

The Animal Welfare Fund has recommended 10 grants totalling $440K:

  • Equalia: $50K
  • Wild Animal Initiative (WAI): $65k
  • Fórum Animal: $20k
  • Fair Fish International: $20k
  • Pan-Hellenic Animal Welfare Federation (PFO): $15k
  • Hong Kong Veg Society: $10k
  • Rethink Priorities: $100k
  • Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST): $20k
  • Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute(SAFCEI): $40k 
  • Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) USA: $100k 

Equalia - $50k

Investigations and broiler chicken advocacy in Spain. Spain confines about 90M broiler chickens at any time and slaughters 660M a year.  Founded late last year by two veterans of Animal Equality, this new group plans to focus solely on improving the welfare and reducing the consumption of broiler chickens. Equalia’s initial investigations and campaigns appear to have prompted the Spanish meat industry to support the introduction of CCTV in slaughterhouses. With additional funds, they’ll launch more investigations focused on the plight of broiler chickens and bring the Europe-wide broiler welfare campaigns to Spain. 

Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) - $65k

Research to help wild animals. Under the new leadership of Michelle Graham, the research plans of WAI largely focus on (i) information gathering, (ii) intervention research, and (iii) academic field-building work. Their recent work includes publishing a review of conservation evidence, submitting a paper to an academic journal and  sponsoring the submission of another paper, compiling a database for different possible humane insecticides, and offering assistance in securing funding to a university-affiliated researcher. Our judgement for this grant is also heavily informed by our reasoning that (a) wild animals may have many very negative experiences throughout their lives, and (b) there seems to be on the order of trillions or more wild vertebrates and quintillions or more wild invertebrates, leading to our inference that (c) the welfare of wild animals is a highly important issue. However, there’s only a handful of groups working on this. We are happy to support this organization’s promising initial steps within this important yet largely neglected area. 

Fórum Animal - $20k

Cage-free work in Brazil. Fórum Animal engages in a variety of activities. These include campaigns to have corporations stop using gestations and battery cages, legislative work that attempts to ban live exports from Brazil, and non-legislative attempts to ban the sale and production of Foie Gras within Brazil. For now, we are most excited by their cage-free work, in large part because of the track record of that intervention and its focus on animals that are relatively numerous. We think there are also several reasons to think that Brazil is quite an important country in which to support further work. Many analyses cite Brazil as one of the globe’s most important emerging markets, and in terms of total animal product consumption, Brazil seems to only trail the USA and China. Brazil also seems to round out the world’s top ten countries in terms of the total number of layer hens, with around 192 million* (~2.6% of the world’s layer hen population).

*This spreadsheet compiles relevant data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)  

Fair Fish International - $20k

Research to help farmed fish. We have found Fair Fish’s compiling of research relevant to farmed fish welfare to be promising. We think that this research could be important preliminary work for future large-scale corporate campaigns to improve farmed fish welfare. That work could be quite important because there are more farmed finfish than there are farmed birds and mammals combined, and because the welfare levels of farmed fish seem comparable or worse than the poor welfare levels experienced by most farmed land animals. We think it is plausible that that in the not-too-distant future, a substantial focus for our movement could be using corporate campaigns to affect positive changes for farmed fish. Fair Fish’s recommendations for species such as Nile Tilapia, Atlantic Salmon, European Seabass, European Perch, Pikeperch, and African Sharptooth Catfish are probably the most comprehensive and clearly cited fish welfare recommendations available at present. Expanding and strengthening Fair Fish’s database to include more of the most numerous species of farmed fish seems fairly promising in our view.  

Pan-Hellenic Animal Welfare Federation (PFO) - $15k

Cage-free work in Greece. With this funding, PFO can intensify their efforts to create a cage-free Greece and their attempts to have the Greek government comply with the EU regulations concerning layer hens. Again, we are excited by further cage-free work, in large part because of the combination of the track record of that intervention and its focus on animals that are relatively numerous. In general, such corporate campaign work nicely complements, and can even be a necessary precursor to, further legislative work that would help layer hens. PFO’s cage-free work could be a helpful contribution to legislative changes or to causing further enforcement of existing legislation within Greece. While Greece has 11.6M layer hens, the country has very little organized factory farming advocacy. PFO is one of the only exceptions, and they’re the first and only active Greek member of the Open Wing Alliance. We hope this funding will help them scale up their activities.

Hong Kong Veg Society - $10k

Veg outreach in Hong Kong. Hong Kong Veg Society works on a variety of programs, including their student ambassador program, online vegan challenge, and work to ensure that restaurants offer veg options. Our rationale for this grant is informed by our belief that Hong Kong is an important place to build the movement, and that activities to build the movement there could have strong positive effects over the medium term. Although Hong Kong per se has a relatively small population (~7.4M people, with 4M land animals plus another ~2 million farmed finfish), it may have the highest rate of meat and seafood consumption. More importantly, though, as part of China, it’s an important presence in what is perhaps, and by a significant margin, the most important country in the world for farmed animals. With local philanthropic spending within Hong Kong focused elsewhere, there’s a gap in the Hong Kong Veg Society’s budget to which we are happy to contribute. 

Rethink Priorities - $100k

Research to help farmed and wild animals. Rethink Priorities focuses on conducting empirical foundational research on neglected causes. We found their previous work on corporate outreach and invertebrate suffering as a cause area useful. With this additional funding, they plan to research and publish on (i) ballot initiatives as an approach to help animals in the USA, (ii) finding concrete interventions in policy and invertebrate welfare with room for more funding, and (iii) wild animal welfare interventions and refining their wild animal welfare agenda. Our decision was mainly informed by our reasoning that (a) research is relevant to funders in evaluating grant opportunities, and to organizations in prioritizing which interventions to engage in, (b) funding for animal research has grown greatly in more recent years but still makes up a relatively small % of overall animal funding, and (c) Rethink Priorities has a track record in providing high-quality research on neglected causes. We hope this funding will help them expand their research agenda and provide more valuable research on important yet still neglected areas like wild animal suffering and animal policy.  

Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) - $20k

General support to help farmed animals in Taiwan. According to FAO (2016), 31M laying hens were farmed in Taiwan, 95% of them in battery cages. EAST is a key animal organization working on farm animal welfare in Taiwan. They’re working on public awareness and public opinion, policy pressure, legislative lobbying, and education. EAST also run a program called the “Friendly Egg Alliance”, which calls for corporations and farmers to move away from cage eggs. For example, they were successful in securing a pledge from Carrefour, one of Taiwan’s largest retailers. They also lead a certification program to ensure that companies will follow through with their commitments. We are under the impression that they have made significant progress in this area, and we are interested in their further progress in testing this novel approach. We hope this funding will help them to scale up their activities, and to provide more information on how to build the movement in Taiwan, as well as other countries in the region where animal advocacy is needed and lacking.  

Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute(SAFCEI) - 40k 

Cage-free work in South Africa. SAFCEI, a Cape Town-based environmental organization, has been working on corporate cage-free campaigns to improve the welfare of South Africa’s 72M layer hens since 2017. Over the last three years, they have conducted thorough industry research, engaged in dialogue with key companies, and played a role in securing cage-free commitments from a handful of restaurants in the region, including McDonald’s. Additional funding will allow this group to expand their institutional campaign work, lead collaborations with other groups in the region, build their digital action network, and launch campaigns to secure additional corporate commitments. 

Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) USA - 100k 

General support. We are providing funding to CIWF in the US to be used for general support. This organization is an integral part of the US coalition of animal groups working on corporate campaigns, has brought about several corporate welfare reforms for broiler chickens, and is tracking corporate compliance on cage-free policies with their annual EggTrack reports. They are currently in need of general funding to cover administrative coststo support their growth. The organization’s impressive track record and concrete plans for the future solidify our confidence that they will use funding effectively.