The Future of Farmed Animal Advocacy
Photo credit: AI in Livestock Management
Over the past several months, I have been reading article after article about where parts of the farmed animal movement may be heading.
From within the farmed animal movement.
I am reading about philanthropic money being used to develop technologies for factory farms. Artificial intelligence to monitor animals more efficiently. New technologies to manage suffering inside intensive production systems. New methods of killing animals. Genetic interventions intended to reduce animals' capacity to suffer. An animal advocacy nonprofit/fund is reportedly even hiring people to operate a commercial broiler farm as a testing ground for welfare technologies that can ultimately be adopted by the industry.
I had always understood animal liberation to be our movement’s shared goal.
To be fair, many, if not all, of the people advancing these ideas would describe themselves as committed to ending farmed animal exploitation. I do not doubt their concern for animals or their desire to find approaches that work. They are responding to a devastating reality: more animals are being farmed and killed than ever, while decades of advocacy have not brought change on the scale any of us hoped to see.
We are all struggling with a way to cope, with a way to continue our work for animals, with looking for new ways to combat the frustration and sadness we are all feeling.
I understand that impulse. I also believe our movement would benefit from an open and honest discussion of which strategies have and have not worked, and why. We should be willing to ask where more—or less—of certain strategies may be needed, and where different approaches might lead us.
As an example, for six years, when I led Mercy For Animals in Canada, I personally negotiated countless corporate cage-free egg commitments. I sat across from companies and tried to persuade them to move away from battery cages.
I believed in that work then.
I don't anymore.
I now believe that welfare reforms such as cage-free campaigns may be slowing the progress of our movement—not because reducing suffering is unimportant, but because these campaigns have received a disproportionate share of our funding, talent, and organizational capacity. This concentration of resources has left far less room to develop and test other approaches, including those aimed at reducing animal use, changing public attitudes, building political power, and offering up plant based alternatives. Welfare reforms may also allow the industry to present modified forms of animal agriculture as sufficient progress. This does not mean that such reforms have no value. It means that we need to ask whether our investment in them has become so dominant that it has limited other work and has also limited us from seeing what our movement could have done and can imagine and achieve moving forward.
Movements have an obligation to examine their own strategies, and so do the people within them.
How Did We Get Here?
The animal welfare movement did not begin with Effective Altruism. It long predates EA.
But the highly quantified, cost-effectiveness-driven approach to farmed animal welfare that has become so influential over the last decade has been profoundly shaped by EA.
EA itself is much broader than the incremental animal welfare work we see in our movement. Within animal advocacy, EA funding and thinking also encompass alternative proteins, research, technology, movement building, and other areas.
But EA brought enormous resources and influence, along with a particular way of thinking about effectiveness. This approach identifies large sources of suffering and seeks to quantify that suffering, first at the individual level and then across a population or species. It compares interventions, estimates their cost-effectiveness, and directs resources toward those expected to produce the largest measurable reduction in suffering. This calculation usually takes place at the population or species level.
There is something very attractive about this.
And, understandably to funders, it offers something extraordinarily attractive: the possibility of knowing how much good their money has done.
Quantification is important. It can help us compare interventions, assess results, and use limited resources responsibly. But it is only part of the picture. Some of the changes that matter most to a social movement—shifts in culture, political power, and what society considers acceptable—are difficult to capture in numbers.
I have been questioning welfare work for years.
I first raised these concerns publicly at the 2019 Animal Rights National Conference and have continued to examine them through my doctoral research and published work, including a chapter on the limits of animal quantification.
My concern then is my concern now:
Not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted tells us whether we are winning.
A cage-free commitment can be counted.
The number of animals who pass through a stunning machine can be counted.
Hours of particular forms of pain can be counted.
But how do we quantify a change in society's understanding of and relationship to animals?
How do we quantify the delegitimization of animal exploitation?
How do we measure how well we are creating an activist network that becomes politically powerful ten years from now?
Diagram above of “The Overton Window”.
How do we assign a numerical value to shifting the Overton window so that something previously regarded as radical becomes politically possible?
How do we quantify a movement's capacity to change culture?
These are not peripheral questions.
These are among the central questions social movements must confront.
And this is where I believe our movement has made one of its most consequential mistakes.
We Have Not Paid Enough Attention to Power
Social movements are fundamentally about challenging the power that maintains the status quo.
Who has it?
How did they get it?
What institutions protect it?
What stories legitimize it?
Who benefits from the status quo?
And, most importantly, how does a movement build enough countervailing power to change it?
Animal agriculture is not simply a very large collection of individual animals experiencing measurable amounts of suffering.
It is a political, economic, and cultural system.
Governments subsidize it. Corporations profit from it. Trade associations defend it. Laws protect it. Advertising normalizes it. Universities support it. Financial institutions invest in it. Political actors depend on it. Cultural narratives make consuming animals appear ordinary and inevitable.
That is power.
If our goal is animal liberation, then our job is not simply to reduce suffering within that system.
Our job is to change the balance of power that allows the system to exist.
That requires people power, narrative power, political power, network power and institutional power.
And much of that work is slow.
It is messy. Sometimes the work that eventually changes a society looks remarkably ineffective right up until the moment it isn't. Consider marriage equality in the United States. For decades, advocates endured setbacks while gradually changing public understanding and building legal and political support. Much of that work may have seemed ineffective in the moment, yet it helped create the conditions for change that later appeared to happen quickly.
This is one reason I am so concerned about the current enthusiasm for welfare technology.
Even writers within the EA community are now warning that EA can be especially attracted to interventions with theories of change that are measurable and scalable, and that this can make fundamentally social and political problems look like simply technical or logistical ones. Their recent critique of the emerging welfare-tech “bubble” explicitly contrasts technological interventions with the slower work of changing law, culture, and political power.
That observation is enormously important.
Because factory farming is not a technical problem.
Factory farming is a power problem.
And we will not engineer our way out of it. Even if a chicken were bred to display fewer signs of pain, we could never know with certainty that the animal was not suffering; no technology can give us direct access to another being's subjective experience.
Animal Welfare Science Is Raising Important Questions
Some of these concerns are now being raised by animal welfare scientists themselves.
In a 2026 perspective paper published in Frontiers in Animal Science, researchers describe what they call “pragmatism bias” in farmed animal welfare science. They argue that funding availability, practical limits on conducting research—such as access to commercial facilities, animals, and genetic strains—and the demands of existing production systems can influence which questions researchers study and how they study them. This can lead the field to focus on intensive production systems, short-term gains, and “symptoms rather than root causes.”
The authors are not arguing that incremental improvements are meaningless. They are warning that when research is continually shaped by what existing systems consider practical, those systems can become further entrenched. Welfare problems may be addressed incrementally while more fundamental questions—and more ambitious possibilities—receive far less attention.
This distinction matters. An intervention may reduce a particular form of suffering and still leave the underlying system largely unchallenged. If research and policy remain focused on improving that system, we may gradually become less able to imagine, investigate, and build alternatives to it.
These warnings echo concerns that critics of welfare reform have raised for years. At the very least, they should lead us to ask difficult questions before directing vastly more money toward work designed to improve the operation of animal agriculture.
The Evidence Is Still Developing
Photo credit: World Organization for Animal Health
Within EA itself, advocates are openly debating whether some animal welfare interventions have been promoted with greater certainty than the available evidence warrants.
A recent EA Forum article, “Animal Welfare Has an Evidence Problem,” examines shrimp stunning, cage-free systems, and alternative proteins. Its author questions whether the evidence supporting some prominent claims is sufficiently strong. The article prompted substantial disagreement from researchers, funders, and practitioners, many of whom offered additional evidence and challenged parts of its analysis.
That discussion does not settle the scientific debate—and neither does the original article. It demonstrates that there is a debate to be had.
Another recent EA Forum analysis cautions against the movement’s recurring search for “silver bullets.” Some interventions initially appear unusually effective, measurable, and scalable, attracting significant resources and enthusiasm. Their implementation and effects, however, often prove more complicated than the original theory suggested.
The authors ask whether welfare technology could become the movement’s next silver bullet. They warn that enthusiasm for a promising intervention can crowd out consideration of other strategies. They urge advocates to ask whether a technology entrenches animal industries or creates leverage over them—and whether it reduces the number of animals used or risks increasing it.
These are precisely the questions I believe we should have been asking all along.
Not merely:
Can we reduce this particular form of suffering?
But:
What does this intervention do for the system that is causing the suffering?
Who Gets to Decide?
Which brings me back to power.
Funding is power.
When a relatively small group of philanthropists can direct enormous amounts of money toward particular interventions, they do much more than fund projects.
They shape the focus of the movement.
Organizations follow funding.
Jobs follow funding.
Research follows funding.
Entire areas of expertise develop around funding.
Strategies become institutionalized because funding makes them possible.
Other strategies struggle to develop because the resources required to test them, refine them, and influence institutions around them never arrive.
When the vast majority of movement funding is directed toward welfare interventions, people who question that approach may fear that speaking publicly could jeopardize their employment, funding, or professional relationships.
A movement for justice should make room for such criticism without requiring people to risk their livelihoods to voice it.
Funders Have the Power to Broaden What Is Possible
This is why funders have both a particular responsibility and an extraordinary opportunity.
Those who hold substantial power within a movement inevitably influence which strategies receive attention, which ideas can be tested, and which organizations are able to survive.
Funders can help create conditions in which disagreement is genuinely safe. They can invite people who question dominant strategies into strategic conversations, respond openly to difficult questions, and ensure that challenging a dominant approach does not carry professional consequences.
They can also examine the assumptions underlying their own theories of change and remain open to interventions that have shown promise but have not yet had the resources or time to develop.
Fund plant-based food-system transformation.
Fund grassroots organizing.
Fund political and narrative change.
Fund effective advocacy training.
Fund movement infrastructure.
Fund ideas whose effects may take ten or twenty years to become visible.
Bring people with differing theories of change into strategic conversations.
No single theory of change should have enough philanthropic power to define what an entire social movement understands “effective” to mean. Complex problems rarely yield to a one-dimensional response. Every funding community has its biases: EA funding may favour what can be quantified, while wealth originating in the technology sector may gravitate toward technological solutions.
Quantification matters, but it is only part of the picture. Social change also depends on political organizing, cultural shifts, movement infrastructure, and the slower, less predictable work of changing public behaviour. When one approach receives nearly all the resources, other promising strategies may never have the opportunity to develop, demonstrate their value, or even be seriously considered.
And Now We Are About to Add Even More Money
Condos for pigs? Thumbnail: David 90 Discovery
This is why the AI philanthropic windfall concerns me so deeply.
Lewis Bollard has described the possibility of new AI wealth ushering in a “Golden Age of Animal Welfare,” with dramatically more money available to end cages and crates, implement fish and shrimp stunning, and investigate breeding interventions and other welfare work.
At the same time, Factory Farming 2.0 documents an emerging ecosystem of animal advocacy-linked initiatives developing, financing, and testing technologies intended for use within animal agriculture—including a nonprofit commercial broiler operation intended to help bridge research and commercial adoption.
And discussions within EA are warning that tech-oriented funders may be especially attracted to welfare technology because it is concrete, measurable, and compatible with industry incentives, while strategies aimed at changing public behaviour or political power tend to be slower, less predictable, and more difficult to measure.
We may be on the verge of receiving more money for animals than many of us could have imagined even a few years ago.
And one of the serious possibilities being discussed is that we use some of that extraordinary philanthropic capacity to help make factory farming better.
I don't want better factory farms.
I want fewer animals in that system. And ultimately, I want no animals in it at all.
That is not naïve.
That is the purpose of a social movement that is seeking to end animal exploitation.
Posted flyer demonizing abolitionists in 1837. Photo Credt: Free Speech Centre
Is Animal Liberation Still Our Goal?
Perhaps this is the conversation we finally need to have.
What is this movement trying to accomplish?
If our goal is ending farmed animal exploitation, we need a different theory of change.
We need to build the political, cultural, and institutional power necessary to reduce animal consumption and eventually end animal exploitation.
We need to make animal agriculture less—not more—entrenched.
We need to challenge animal agriculture’s legitimacy rather than help perfect its operation.
We need to promote alternatives.
We need to move food systems toward plants.
And we need to remember that social movements exist precisely because the world as it is does not have to remain the world as it is.
I want us to talk about this.
Openly.
Without fear.
And before a movement created to end animal exploitation finds itself building the next generation of factory farms.
Always for the Animals,
Krista
Krista Hiddema, “The Power of Love to Transform Animal Lives: The Deception of Animal Quantification” (Oxford University Press, 2023), doi:10.1093/oso/9780197655696.003.0012.
Roi Mandel et al., “Pragmatism Bias in Farm Animal Welfare Science,” Frontiers in Animal Science 7 (2026), doi:10.3389/fanim.2026.1841684.
matthes, “animal welfare has an evidence problem,” EA Forum, 2026, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/svjqgyFuFQ34qSgmw/animal-welfare-has-an-evidence-problem.
Rockwell, Tom Billington, et al., “Beware Silver Bullets: Are We Making ‘Welfare Tech’ into the Next Animal Advocacy Bubble?,” EA Forum, 2026, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QHgfRkiNFoGyysDpn/beware-silver-bullets-are-we-making-welfare-tech-into-the.
Lewis Bollard, “The AI Windfall,” Farm Animal Welfare, Substack, https://farmanimalwelfare.substack.com/p/the-ai-windfall.
“Factory Farming 2.0,” Collectively Gary, Substack, https://collectivelygary.substack.com/p/factory-farming-20.
Dr. Krista Hiddema is an animal advocate, educator, researcher, and nonprofit leader who has spent decades working toward total animal liberation. Her career has spanned the nonprofit, philanthropic, academic, and for-profit sectors, including senior leadership roles with Mercy For Animals and the Karuna Foundation. She is the founder of SPAA — Strategic Planning for Action and Accountability — a free educational program that helps advocates and organizations become stronger and more effective. Krista holds a Doctor of Social Sciences and focuses much of her work on social movement strategy and organizational capacity.