The effective altruism movement has increasingly focused on animal welfare as a high-impact cause area, applying evidence-based reasoning to identify which interventions reduce the most suffering per dollar spent.
Effective altruism's application to animal welfare has significantly increased funding to evidence-based interventions and shifted focus toward cause areas with the greatest welfare impact per dollar spent. The framework's emphasis on scale — reaching the most animals — naturally leads to farmed animal welfare, where the numbers are enormous. Corporate campaigns that change the welfare standards of major food companies reach billions of animals in supply chains, making them among the most cost-effective welfare interventions identified. The EA framework also pushes welfare advocates to consider difficult questions: how to weigh wild animal suffering, how much weight to give invertebrate welfare, and how to direct limited resources most effectively.