How effective altruism principles can be applied to animal advocacy to maximize welfare impact per dollar and per hour, including cause prioritization and evidence-based intervention selection.
Effective altruism for animals applies systematic, evidence-based thinking to the question of where advocacy and resource allocation produce the most welfare benefit. The scale of farmed animal suffering is so large — approximately 80 billion land animals annually — that even small per-animal welfare improvements represent enormous aggregate benefit. EA analysis consistently identifies factory farming as an extremely high-priority cause given the scale of suffering, tractability of interventions, and relative neglect compared to other moral priorities. Individual dietary change, corporate campaigns, and alternative protein research and development all represent evidence-supported interventions that improve welfare at scale.