Not all animal advocacy interventions are equally effective — evidence-based approaches to reducing animal suffering maximize impact per dollar and hour invested.
Effective animal advocacy requires applying the same evidence-based thinking to animal welfare interventions that effective altruism applies to human welfare. Some advocacy approaches are dramatically more impactful than others: corporate outreach securing cage-free commitments has affected hundreds of millions of hens at relatively low cost; individual leafleting has weaker evidence for lasting diet change. Prioritizing interventions based on scale (how many animals affected), neglectedness (how few resources are currently directed there), and tractability (how much progress is achievable) allows advocates to maximize impact. This framework suggests prioritizing farmed animal welfare (enormous scale), fish welfare (severely neglected given sentience evidence), and wild animal welfare (vast scale, highly neglected) over companion animal welfare alone, though all remain important.