TL;DR

• When surveyed, the EA community and leaders think ~18-24% of resources should go towards animal advocacy. The actual figure is about 7%.
• We as the EA ecosystem are putting less resources (money and time) into animal advocacy than the movement thinks we should when surveyed.
• This disparity could be because of loss of message fidelity, it's a harder cause area to pitch donors, or the role of large funders, but I'm honestly not too sure.

My job at Senterra Funders involves making the case to EA/EA adjacent prospective donors that they can do a tonne of good by donating to animal advocacy charities. As part of this work I’ve noticed a certain level of inconsistency in the EA ecosystem: I encounter a lot more people who want the animal advocacy movement to 'win' than people working in or donating to the space.

The numbers

It turns out this intuition is backed up by survey data.

Sources (see Appendix for extra details):

• Meta Coordination Forum (MCF; 2024) / Talent Need Survey on ideal allocation of financial resources
• EA Community survey data from 2023 on jobs by cause area I obtained in private correspondence with David Moss.
• Historical EA funding data: 2025 update on actual EA donations by case area.
• Note: I didn’t include the 2023 supplementary materials for the EA Community Survey Cause Prioritization because there wasn’t a category on ‘meta’ which made it too confusing to include without extra work. Having said that, at a glance the numbers look fairly similar to the meta coordination forum survey.

Looking at this chart, it’s quite striking that about 2.5 times less money goes towards animal advocacy than both the community (here), and ‘EA leaders’ think should go towards this cause area.

There’s also a similar issue with where people are working. Compared to animal advocacy, there are almost 4x as many people working in x-risk, 2x in ‘meta’.

Accounting for the disparity

What’s going on here? Either these numbers are wrong, the optimal allocation of resources has changed since this post went out, or this is a big failing of allocation of resources?

Here are some speculative reasons why this might be the case:

1. The funding split is dominated by Coefficient Giving. Coefficient Giving/Good Ventures makes up the majority of EA donations in 2025, so this will dominate the funding allocation. Although, the data shows 9% of CG’s funding going to farm animals in 2025, which is higher than the 7% average, so CG is actually bringing up the average substantially.
2. Helping farm animals is a tougher pitch than helping humans. To the extent that a lot of EA funders are working with other funders in the broader ecosystem, it’s much easier to bring in new funders to helping the world’s poorest people than helping chickens or fish.
3. The message from ‘EA leaders’ has been lost in translation. It’s safe to say that for quite a while now the vibe in EA has been that x-risk and AI are the most important problem to tackle. I respect the people who have been saying this quite a lot and don’t disagree with their assessment. I do worry that the message from some EA leaders might have looked like “AI Safety looks to be more pressing on the margin but with wide error margins and factory farming seems really important too”, and came out as “AI safety is the most pressing problem”. My evidence for this is the MCF survey, and the fact that CG is spending a far higher % on farm animal welfare than the wider movement.

I’m writing this with a genuine curiosity of what others think of the claims made. Is there a misallocation of resources here? And if so, why?

Mandatory caveats to end on:

• Different data is sliced in different ways across cause area divides. If you look at the original sources it should be clear how I combined sources.
• It’s also unclear how we should define the border of EA money and non-EA money. In order for this to not balloon out I accepted these numbers as presented.
• This is a rougher version of this post than I’d like due to time constraints, but the main information is all there.
• I am almost certainly biased because my job is fundraising for the animal advocacy ecosystem, so feel free to tell me why I’m wrong (or right).
• Views are my own not Senterra Funders.

Appendix 1. Data Sources

Meta Coordination Forum (2024) / Talent Need Survey

 “What (rough) percentage of resources should the EA community devote to the following broad areas over the next five years?”

“What (rough) percentage of financial resources should the EA community devote to the following specific areas over the next five years?”

EA Community Survey: Cause Prioritization (2023) 

Historical EA funding data: 2025 update

Note: my data has updated numbers from Coefficient giving and Longview Philanthropy based on this section. I didn’t include Founders Pledge as I wasn’t sure about their allocation across cause areas.

EA Survey - work by cause area

This data is from the EA Survey 2024m shared by David Moss in a private correspondence

Caveat from David: “respondents who indicated that they worked for an EA org or do EA direct work could indicated that their work involved multiple cause areas (which I think makes sense, as one might work on GCRs, including both AI and other GCRs). As such I've included both the percentage of total selections and the percentage of total respondents”