Happy holidays! If you’re reading this newsletter, you likely care about doing the most good you can for animals. This newsletter is designed to help you think through how this holiday season.

The Problem While the world has gotten much better for humans, it’s gotten much worse for farm animals. Factory farms confine 11 times more vertebrate animals than they did 50 years ago, about 110 billion at any time (see graph below). If FAO projections come true, factory farms will confine another roughly 90 billion animals by 2050, or 20 for every human on earth.



Factory farms confine these animals to crowded cages and barren pens, cut off their beaks, tails, and genitals without pain relief, and slaughter them with so little attention to their wellbeing that many die piece-by-piece. The fishing industry alone kills 3-8 billion animals every day, most by slow suffocation, crushing, or live disemboweling. If you value a year of an individual animal’s suffering at even one 100th of the human equivalent, the growth in factory farming may outweigh all progress in alleviating human suffering this century.



Yet almost no resources are devoted to this problem. Donors gave five times more money to Harvard University last year than to all advocacy for the world’s farm animals. Of the 3% of US philanthropy that goes to helping animals, only about one hundredth (or 0.03% of total giving) goes toward farm animals. By my estimate, more advocacy has focused on the wellbeing of one captive orca, Tilikum, than on the wellbeing of all the world’s billions of captive farmed fish.



And even the meager advocacy focused on farm animals has a mixed track record. US activists for years focused mostly on convincing people to go vegetarian or vegan, yet only about 1% of Americans have, and that number that has barely budged in two decades — while the other 99% are eating more meat than ever before. Other activists have focused on opposing new factory farms or promoting small family farms, yet the the former have continued to grow at the expense of the latter. Some groups have even devoted more resources to attacking other animal advocates than attacking factory farming.