The effective altruism movement has developed frameworks for comparing and prioritizing animal welfare interventions by scale, tractability, and neglectedness.
Effective altruism approaches to animal welfare provide a framework for allocating limited resources toward the highest-impact interventions. The scale of suffering in industrial animal agriculture — billions of individuals in conditions welfare scientists identify as causing significant suffering — combined with the tractability of corporate campaign and policy interventions, makes farmed animal welfare one of the highest-impact cause areas in the EA framework. Wild animal welfare represents a potential future priority of even larger scale, but faces research and tractability challenges that limit near-term impact. The EA framework is not without critics: neglecting to help animals suffering right now in favor of uncertain future interventions raises ethical concerns, and the framework can be used to justify approaches that some consider too incremental. But the evidence that strategic, targeted interventions can improve welfare at massive scale at low cost is a powerful argument for evidence-based animal welfare philanthropy.