No one can realistically aim to impact all animals and solve every problem. Given our limitations and the scale of animal suffering that exist in the world, we have no choice but to prioritise.
We believe that working on farmed and wild animal suffering has a greater chance of helping more animals and making a big difference.
In these articles, we explain why we think prioritisation is so important and necessary, as well as our reasons why we pick these groups of animals in particular.
The case for prioritisation
The problem area you select may be one of the biggest factors of the impact you can generate in your career. There are also reasonable metrics available that you can consider to make your judgments about prioritisation in animal advocacy, like scale, neglectedness and solvability.
Farmed animal suffering
The rise of factory farming led to the suffering of billions upon billions of animals. Unfortunately, concern for farmed animals is not proportional to their continuous suffering at scale. Fortunately though, there are promising ways of helping them.
Wild animal suffering
Contrary to common knowledge, many wild animals do not have happy lives. There are many causes of their suffering like disease, hunger, predation, bad weather, and human interference. While there is some concern for the preservation of endangered wild animals, wild animal suffering is very neglected in animal advocacy.
Why not other animals? (And a note about our fallibility)
Some might rightly question why we do not prioritise companion animals like cats and dogs, animals used in laboratories, animals used for entertainment, or endangered animals. While we agree that efforts in these fields are also very valuable and laudable, we still think there are reasons why working on these problems may have less potential for high impact.