A short survey on bottlenecks in effective animal advocacy from nine attendees of Effective Altruism Global London

At EAG London 2019, we encouraged the attendees of the farmed animal welfare meetup event to pick a smaller sub-group to join for the majority of the session. I hosted a sub-group discussing “movement-wide bottlenecks.” The 9 participants (including myself) included individuals working at 3 ACE-recommended “top charities,” 4 EAA researchers, and the 2 co-founders of a new animal advocacy organisation. I asked them the following question:

“To what extent is each of the following a bottleneck for the farmed animal movement? (1 is that this is never a practical limiting factor. 3 is that this is one of the most important limiting factors for the majority project ideas or plans. 5 is that this is not only preventing the movement from growing, but is causing it to down-size or reduce its most impactful activities.)”

The average scores awarded were:

• A lack of leaders, co-founders, and engaged advocates in countries outside of North America and western Europe: 3.4
• A lack of management experience and leadership “talent”: 3.2
• A lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion: 2.8
• A lack of awareness and engagement with existing EAA research among animal advocacy organisations: 2.6
• A lack of funding: 2.4
• A lack of coordination between those working on similar problems: 2.4

You can see the structure of the event here, and see the responses by participant here, including free form responses to a question inviting participants to write down their “favourite 1 to 3 suggestions” to “deal with these bottlenecks” (after paired discussion).

Two participants suggested other bottlenecks that could have been included in the list of options:

• “Overabundance of generalists, lack of experts.”
• “Insufficient resources for evaluating first-order charities.”
• “Systematic + thorough research into how best to improve animal welfare.”