There’s been a back and forth for the past few years about Animal Charity Evaluators’ research, and I have sympathized, in most cases, with both camps. As I’ve said before I have tremendous respect for ACE . I think their promotion of impact and evidence has greatly benefited the movement, and some of the subsidiary conclusions, that we should focus on farmed animals or that we should think about counterfactuals, are totally correct. At the same time, I think their research has had flaws that critics have correctly pointed out. A further reason for my support is my sense that ACE is steadily improving, and for this reason I wanted to note that I think ACE missed an opportunity to really follow its own growing body of research with its review of and decision not to recognize the Save Movement.





50 chapters just under three years ago to around 500 today. As far as I know, that outpaces the actual establishment of communities by the more centralized nonprofits. The Save Movement is a collection of people around the world who organize vigils at slaughterhouses to bear witness to the animals killed there. I participated with Save from around June 2017 through last July and left because of a combination of graduate school, personal reasons, and shifting interests. I was confused when I first heard of it as to what the point was of having people protesting in the middle of nowhere to people who do not care. What Save is doing is building a movement: according to ACE’s review , which is in line with my understanding, the number of chapters participating has roughly doubled for each of the past few years, going from around50chapters just under three years ago to around500today. As far as I know, that outpaces the actual establishment of communities by the more centralized nonprofits.





ACE has been saying for a while that individual veg advocacy does not look very promising (contrary to earlier ACE research), and recently ACE put out a report on protests that came down thinking that while protests may not be the most promising tactic, more of them would be better on the margin relative to other activism in our movement. One reason for this was their contribution to growing the movement.





If that is the case, then I think that Save is very effective at an advocacy tactic that ACE recognizes our movement ought to do more. A counterargument might be that while movement growth is indeed important, we need a specific type of movement growth, i.e. growth in activists doing effective campaigning. This is a reasonable argument, but I don’t think it’s correct. While it’s true that movement growth is important only in that it leads to direct impacts down the line, that puts movement growth without a specific campaign in basically the same basket as research or symbolic lawsuits aimed at changing social norms. It is several degrees removed from direct impact, with the intervening degrees relying on an assumption that a rising tide raises all ships.





This is far from an ironclad case for Save’s activism, but again, as ACE has been realizing for a while, the current state of evidence in the movement is weak. Every recommendation requires a judgment call, and as much as the "stand out" distinction smacks of confidence, the reasoning behind all stand out designations is explicitly tentative and uncertain. I think that if we treat the weak but existent evidence on Save the same way as the tentative evidence on other charities, its tactics look promising.



