Q&A: What is the best way to help animals yourself?

FarmKind exists to answer the question: How can we actually help as many animals as possible, as effectively as possible? Instead of focusing on encouraging people to become vegan and vegetarian, they advocate donating to groups that are making a difference. The nonprofit platform takes the difficulty out of donation by hand-selecting effective charities, then showing donors the tangible impact of their money through a "compassion calculator." We asked FarmKind’s Thom Norman why the organization takes the approach it does. 

Q: Why do you think asking people to change their diet isn't effective? Should people change their diet, or is it just that it's not good strategy to prioritize trying to get them to do it?

Thom Norman: Asking people to change their diet is not only ineffective, it often backfires. When someone agrees that factory farming is wrong, which most people do, and we tell them the only way to make a difference is to change their diet, it often triggers the three Ds:

(1.) Denial: people try to explain away the problem or bury their head in the sand.

(2.) Despair: people believe the only way to take action against factory farming is a boycott they can’t see succeeding. 

(3.) Defiance: shaming people and telling them what to do makes them defensive and defiant, turning potential supporters into antagonists.

Focusing on diet change not only alienates most of the people who want to help end factory farming, but it also puts an upper limit on how much good one person can do. You can only stop eating the amount of animal products you currently eat—so your impact is capped. There's no theoretical limit to the good one person can do through their donations. So, instead of focusing on harming as little as possible, FarmKind focuses on preventing as much harm as possible: it's both a bigger and easier opportunity to act on.

This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t change their diet if they have the desire or capacity to do so. It’s a great way to help! But we think that fixating on just one option for people to make a difference leaves millions of potential supporters on the sidelines, and the movement to end factory farming needs all the support that it can get.

Q: If encouraging people to make the personal choice to go vegan or vegetarian isn't the best answer, then how do we reduce and eventually eliminate factory farming? Your group encourages people to make donations to offset the harms they cause. Why?

Norman: Right now, the best answer is whatever can turn the really high levels of support for ending factory farming (e.g. this survey finds 75 percent of people say they oppose it) into meaningful action. That means it needs to be easy and yet make a difference. Donating to the right charities is a perfect candidate. We encourage people who aren't willing to change their diet right now to at least do an equivalent amount of good through donating. To make this concrete, donating just $23 a month to the charities we recommend has the equivalent impact as cutting all animal products out of your diet for the average Westerner.

And the beauty of donating is that it allows us to make change at the systemic level, by influencing the institutions, corporations and governments that have leverage over the system. For example, Sinergia Animal's work on corporate campaigns that have convinced 152 companies to stop using eggs from caged hens, or The Humane League's policy work like successfully defending the landmark animal welfare policy, Proposition 12, at the Supreme Court, which ensured that hens, mother pigs and calves in California have enough room to move freely. 

Driving this systemic change takes money. We’re currently in a David and Goliath situation, with less than $300 million per year of funding for organizations trying to tackle a $2 trillion industry. We urgently need to scale up our efforts to change the industry. That means raising a lot more money to fund effective charities while also growing the movement to end factory farming by welcoming everyone who shares this goal to play a part, regardless of their diet.

Q: How do you calculate where money is actually going to make a difference to animals? A lot of people hesitate to give money because it's hard to know if you're achieving results or just doing the equivalent of "setting it on fire." Changing diet is very tangible, whereas we never see the impact of our donations up close.

Norman: People are right to be hesitant about donating—how do you know whether to trust a charity’s marketing? Most charities are opaque, and many aren't rigorously measuring whether their programs make a difference. The key is to donate to the very best charities, those that have been independently evaluated (so you don't have to trust their marketing) and have a proven track record of meaningful impact.

For those of us who have changed our diets, it's easy to think of that as the most tangible way to help animals. But for many, the impact of diet change doesn’t always feel that tangible, because we are so divorced from where our food comes from. Most people don’t see a pig when they look at a package of bacon, or a chicken when they see a nugget. This lack of connection makes it easy for people to continue buying these products, and can make stopping feel like it's not tangibly helping animals at all.  Indeed, donating doesn’t always feel tangible, and this is partly why it’s so overlooked as a way to help. To overcome this, we estimate the impact that each donation will have, which makes the impact feel as concrete as it is. Many people who use our platform cite these estimates and the detailed descriptions of how their money helps animals as key reasons for donating.

We calculate the estimated impact of each donation by looking at our charities’ real-world data. For example, the Fish Welfare Initiative drastically improves the life of an individual fish for just 46 cents. Their Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA) program teaches farmers practical techniques to improve water quality, which is the biggest welfare issue facing farmed fish. Currently, over 120 farms have joined the alliance, collectively caring for approximately 5.8 million fish at any given time. By looking at the charity’s operational costs, the number of fish on each farm, and their rigorous water quality measurements that show when farmers are following their advice, we can calculate how far your donation goes.

We are very transparent about the inherent limitations in our methodology. But they still serve as directional (and generally quite conservative) estimates that demonstrate just how powerful donating is and just how concrete the impact is.

This Q&A, along with dozens more, is published in the most recent print edition of Current Affairs.