Summary

In January 2026, FarmKind ran a provocative media campaign which used controversial media messaging and materials to promote ‘offsetting’ as an option for individuals who are concerned about factory farming but are currently unwilling or unable to change their diet.

The campaign raised an estimated $16,700--$59,300 (explained in our Results section below) and generated a number of media ‘hits’ including TV and created some debate that many advocates have told us they found productive. However we made mistakes in its execution and generated unproductive controversy within the EA and animal advocacy movements.

This post aims to explain our theory of change, what happened, what we got wrong, and what we learned.

We still believe mobilizing the meat-eating majority to take action for farmed animals requires meeting them where they're at, which sometimes means provocative framing that distinguishes us from vegan advocacy -- though we understand many in the movement disagree. However, we regret specific execution failures, particularly our insufficient stakeholder consultation, which risks sparking infighting within the animal movement.

Context

FarmKind is a donation platform that aims to bring more money into the movement against factory farming. People donate through our platform directly to six highly effective farmed animal charities. The donations never touch our bank account and we don’t take a cut. In 2025 we spent $0.25M and raised $3.35M (13.27x gross multiplier; estimated 2.94x net counterfactual multiplier). Our platform has had >7000 donations from >2900 donors, of which 674 have active monthly subscriptions.

The goals of our campaign

All FarmKind activities ultimately aim to help generate counterfactual donations to cost-effective farmed animal charities. Our activities exist on a spectrum from:

• Direct drivers: Activities like YouTuber sponsorships that yield measurable, immediate returns (like this example that generated $6,385^[1]).

• Indirect drivers: Like brand-building and media activities (like this Op Ed), which increase our platform's SEO and serve as credibility signals to improve donor conversion over time.

This campaign was designed to "newsjack" mainstream discourse and pivot it toward factory farming.

Primary goals

• Drive donations directly, with the understanding that almost all potential donations occur in our ‘north star’ scenario of major TV coverage^[2].

• Land credibility boosting media which serves as a "trust signal" on our platform to drive conversion and helps us land further podcast interviews, which we know to be a major direct donation driver.

Secondary goals

• Spread our core message that you don’t have to be vegan to help animals. We think that many people who are not willing to change their diet currently assume that there’s nothing for them to do about factory farming. We want them to know that’s not the case, opening the door to future actions for animals and a shift in their identity towards being ‘pro-animal’. This hypothesis is informed by research from Rethink Priorities that finds that diet change is perceived as significantly more difficult than donating.

• Platform Veganuary in the media, giving them another opportunity to make the case for diet change to a large audience that might otherwise not hear from them (e.g). Rally Veganuary’s fans to defend and make the case for them publicly, increasing the publicity and potentially public donations they receive^[3].

How we envisaged it working

Phase 1 (Bait): Each year, the media writes stories critical of Veganuary and ‘do this instead of Veganuary’ articles. For example here, here and here. We decided to use a provocative angle to bait UK tabloids and right-wing publications into covering us. The goal was to ‘judo-flip’ these outlets from their usual vegan skepticism into a more productive discussion about how to address factory farming, highlighting donations as an alternative -- Small expected benefit in terms of donations.

Phase 2 (Parlay): Leverage early tabloid interest into more sophisticated "prestige" media, radio, and most importantly TV. This is where we could state our core message clearly to a massive audience -- Brand benefit from prestige media + High potential donations from TV/Radio, which we’d be testing for the first time.

Phase 3 (North Star): Our ideal outcome was a high-profile debate (e.g. on Piers Morgan) between FarmKind and a vegan advocate. The audience would discover that both sides agree factory farming is an atrocity and that there are multiple great ways to do something about it, and are merely debating which one(s) individuals should choose this January -- Very high donation potential.

Launching the campaign

We partnered with three top competitive eaters to talk about donating to “offset” the animal welfare impact of their diet as they undertake one of their typical eating challenges. By working with individuals who are already eating meat, we reduced the suspicion often held by "entrenched" meat eaters that our secret goal is to make them vegan. This approach was informed by research from Pax Fauna, which suggests that meat eaters are more effective messengers to their peers than vegans are. Our goal was to provide social proof to meat eaters that people like them agree that helping farmed animals is a worthwhile cause.

We built a microsite for the campaign (originally at ForgetVeganuary.com, now at cantgiveupmeat.com^[4]) which presents a controversial framing for our campaign: that even a competitive eater can have as much or more positive impact on farm animal suffering as a vegan.

This was accompanied by a mini-game where players have to make it through Veganuary by dodging common anti-vegan tropes. The purpose of this was to make the website more engaging and also signal that our campaign was not entirely straight-faced (playing as an oat milk carton trying to dodge “but lions eat meat” doesn’t scream ‘take me completely seriously’).

The website also explains how donations are used by our recommended charities to help farmed animals, and then gives visitors the option to set up a monthly donation through our Compassion Calculator.

This website aimed to serve a dual purpose: On the one hand, it had to be consistent enough with the campaign framing that it would encourage the media to run our story. On the other hand, we also wanted it to be capable of converting users into offsetters/donors.

We briefed the story as an exclusive to The Telegraph. This was then picked up by GB News and Daily Mail and Asia Business Daily. We also secured a TV spot on GBNews and an op-ed on The Daily Mail.

Coordination with Veganuary

Did you tell Veganuary about the campaign in advance?

Yes. We wanted to understand and consider any concerns about potential harms to their work, as we genuinely want their campaign to succeed. 

We first told Veganuary in early November that we were going to run a media push calling on people to offset their diets in January. In early December, as our planning developed, we told them that that campaign would be called ‘Forget Veganuary’ and that we would work with competitive eaters for the campaign.

Due to our internal coordination failure (explained in our "What we got wrong" section below), Veganuary did not see the actual landing page before launch. This was a significant oversight. While we had shared the concept and tagline, we should have ensured they saw the full execution and framing before it went live. We would have been happy to make adjustments earlier had we received feedback at that stage, but the responsibility for showing them the full picture was ours, not theirs.

Did Veganuary object to the campaign?

Not as initially described, but upon seeing the full execution yes: Specifically, Wendy (Veganuary's CEO) clarified that the campaign tagline was more direct than she had anticipated, and expressed concern that it could undermine both Veganuary and the value of diet change. By this point, we had conducted an interview with the Telegraph and the journalist was writing up the story, but from that point onwards, we looped Veganuary in more closely, including a number of calls between our founders and Veganuary leadership. We asked their view on whether/how to continue, shared drafts for their feedback (e.g. talking points before interviews and Op Eds before submission) and made amendments accordingly.

Is there bad blood between you and Veganuary?

The FarmKind team remain on open and respectful terms with Wendy and we want to emphasize that there is no personal animosity and we bear no ill will towards anyone at or associated with Veganuary. We remain in ongoing dialogue with Wendy, sharing all comms related to this campaign (including this) for feedback prior to release. Toni remains incredibly proud of the work she has done during her time at Veganuary and continues to wish for them to succeed. 

We particularly empathize with the perspective of Veganuary staff and community members. We acknowledge that the campaign may have been deeply demotivating to those working on diet change and we are sorry.

Does Veganuary endorse this campaign?

To be clear, we do not claim Veganuary endorsed this campaign, and they bear no responsibility for the decisions we made. We encourage anyone upset by this campaign to direct their blame entirely at FarmKind. Please do not take our actions as representative of any group other than ourselves.

What we got wrong

1) Underestimating the risk of movement infighting

We correctly foresaw that many individuals would dislike the campaign, but we mistakenly assumed that any negative reaction would be directed at us. We didn’t consider that we might be seen as speaking for a particular faction (e.g. welfarists or moderates) against another (e.g. vegan advocates or abolitionists). This was an oversight.

While we were in contact with Veganuary’s leadership and have no ill will against the campaign, we didn’t consider that the appearance of opposition could trigger genuine infighting within the broader movement. We have since learned that the movement can start fighting even if the organizations involved are not actually at odds.

Some advocates have pointed out that the ideal amount of movement debate isn't zero, and that productive disagreement sometimes requires challenging prevailing approaches. We take that point. However, infighting has historically been a destructive force within animal advocacy, consuming advocates' limited time and energy on attacking each other rather than addressing factory farming. If you're going to risk sparking it, that should be a deliberate, carefully considered choice -- not an accidental side effect.

To clarify what we mean by "infighting": We're not referring to critical forum posts or heated Slack discussions—that's normal movement discourse. The concern raised by experienced advocates was about larger-scale factional conflict where organizations or cohorts actively work to undermine each other's campaigns, counterprotest each other's actions, or spend significant resources attacking other parts of the movement. We don't have deep experience with the history of such conflicts in animal advocacy, so we largely deferred to advisors with far more movement experience. We heard a range of different perspectives on how to proceed and took a highly risk-averse approach.

We're genuinely uncertain whether this was appropriate or whether we cut our media push short unnecessarily, but we acknowledge the latter is a real possibility.

What we would do differently: We will more carefully model how campaigns might be perceived as factional even when that's not our intent, and consult with people across different parts of the movement earlier in the planning process.

2) Insufficient stakeholder consultation

Due to our mistake above, we did not consult or inform stakeholders like our past funders, our recommended charities and other key movement figures (other than Veganuary themselves) before launch. This would have allowed us to explain our intentions, our theory of change and our amicable feelings towards Veganuary ahead of time, ensure they didn’t take the tabloids at face value, anticipate problems we missed, and reduce the risk of movement infighting.

What we would do differently: For any future campaign with controversy potential, we will engage a broader set of stakeholders in advance -- not just the organizations most directly involved.

3) Internal coordination failures

We had a lapse in internal communication regarding exactly what information was shared with Veganuary. FarmKind’s leadership did not, at first, request to be copied on all emails with Veganuary, which led us to mistakenly assume they had seen the landing page before launch. As a result, Veganuary’s feedback on the landing page could only be considered after the campaign was already live. We want to be clear that, as founders, Thom and Aidan take full responsibility for this oversight.  

What we would do differently: Leadership will be copied on all external communications for campaigns of this nature.

How we responded to concerns

As described above, we made significant mistakes in how we executed this campaign. We heard concerns from a number of fellow animal advocates and EAs and this gave us pause. We re-evaluated to see if we’d missed anything. The concerns we found most compelling were:

1. If this sparks infighting, that could very easily do more harm to animals than this campaign could possibly do good
2. Our recommended charities’ existing donor base might mistakenly believe that they endorse the campaign and stop donating as a result. This concern was most acute for The Humane League UK, because the campaign was most widely covered in the UK (where Veganuary began and is most widely known). Even though FarmKind only directs donations to THL International, this was not clear to all THL UK donors.
3. That our campaign might reflect negatively on, or be taken as endorsed by, our funders.

In response, we:

• Looped Veganuary in more closely, including a number of calls between our founders and Veganuary leadership. We asked their view on whether/how to continue, shared drafts for their feedback (e.g. talking points before interviews and Op Eds before submission) and made amendments accordingly.
• Looped The Humane League UK on media outreach mentioning THL to mitigate risk to their brand (at their request, we removed their mention from the Daily Mail Op Ed pre-publication)
• Consulted experienced leaders within the farmed animal movement to understand and mitigate infighting risk -- in particular (a) those within the more radical parts of the community and (b) those who understand the UK context.
  • The purpose of these calls was to understand and mitigate the risk of movement infighting, explain the campaign’s strategy more candidly than we could do publicly at the time, and solicit a diverse range of informed takes on the question “what would you do right now if you were us?”
  • We were heartened to encounter next to no evidence that this had incited infighting so far, but we decided to be careful and continue to take advice on how to mitigate the risk of that going forward, given the stakes.
• Took an interview on a vegan YouTube channel to explain our intentions directly to this specific audience, as they were the group most likely to take issue with our approach. While we knew the chances of winning people over was very low, we hoped that if this audience understood that we have no qualms with Veganuary and see ourselves as sharing their goals, it might mitigate the risk of sparking infighting.
• Made changes to website such as adding the disclaimer: “Our recommended charities did not provide support for FarmKind’s campaign. FarmKind’s recommendation of these charities should not be taken as an endorsement by them of any of FarmKind’s activities” and editing the landing page to soften language that advocates found most disparaging

On personal attacks: We want to address something that shouldn't need saying but does: A number of individuals directed personal attacks at our Head of Special Projects, Toni Vernelli, who has dedicated decades of her life to campaigning for farmed animals. There's an important distinction between critiquing strategies or campaigns—which is how movements improve—and attacking the people behind them. The former is legitimate and welcome. The latter is neither acceptable nor constructive.

Results

In addition to the early tabloid coverage, as hoped, we landed national TV coverage on GB News and radio coverage on LBC and an Op Ed in the Daily Mail where we got to say our core message more clearly^[5] and to a larger audience. However, to moderate the risk of inciting infighting, we leaned out of controversy.

As a result of this more mild-mannered approach, the LBC radio interview wasn’t aired. This change in approach lost us momentum in the media, and meant we stood little chance of landing the North Star coverage like Piers Morgan. We think that, on balance, this was the right call given the risks raised, but we could be wrong about this. For example, any damage to the movement might already have been done and we may simply have given up potential upside.

The campaign also sparked significant commentary in online channels aimed primarily at vegans and animal advocates.

• Chris Bryant: “FORGET VEGANUARY” -- Is Toni Vernelli Cooking, Or Is She Cooked?
• Aidan Kankyoku: “Constructive Infighting”
• David Ramms: Should We “Forget Veganuary”? Debating the Campaign That Says Keep Eating Meat
• Vegan Horizon: “Veganuary is Under Attack”
• Comments in the Margin: “Forget FarmKind: How EA Goes off the Rails”
• Unnatural Vegan: “Forget Veganuary?”
• ForgetFarmkind.com -- We recommend checking this one out.. it's well executed and funny!
• Aidan Kankyoku: “Vegans Are Monks. We Need a Role for Laypeople.”

There is some really thought-provoking and valuable discourse in here, and so long as it doesn’t lead to infighting, we’re glad to see it! This discourse seems to have rallied many advocates around Veganuary, which we’re glad for, particularly given they face criticism from within the vegan community itself.

As of 22nd January, we estimate donations generated by this as $16,692 using the most conservative attribution logic, and $59,262 by less conservative logic^[6] -- probably lower than it would have been had we not pulled back from controversy mid-campaign. This translates to a 0.82 - 3.27x gross funding multiplier^[7]. This doesn’t include future donations that these donors might initiate, or any future podcast interviews or other coverage this campaign might unlock. It also doesn’t include additional donations to Veganuary that this campaign may have caused (we observed a number of cases of people on social media claiming they were going to donate to Veganuary because of this). Whilst this is more donations than resulted from any news coverage we’ve previously received, we do not consider this an exciting result.

FAQs

Are you anti-vegan?

No. FarmKind’s co-founders are both vegan^[8] and we believe veganism is a powerful tool for helping farmed animals. We want Veganuary to succeed in driving diet change.

However, even though broad public opposition to factory farming is high^[9], rates of veganism have remained stubbornly flat. In the US, for example, polling finds the number has remained roughly the same since 2012 and in the UK since at least 2019.

We believe we need to provide more options and lower the barrier to entry for the vast majority of people who are not currently vegan, so they can start helping. Donating is one such option. Recent research from Rethink Priorities finds that diet change is perceived as significantly more difficult than donating and equally impactful.

Meanwhile, donating has some advantages as a way to help fix this problem:

• Uncapped upside: You can only stop eating the amount of meat you currently eat, so your impact is capped. There’s no theoretical limit to the good you can do by donating
• Reparations: Diet change can’t help the animals you’d already eaten before making the change. Donating can’t help those specific animals either, but it can allow you to go beyond stopping causing harm and to pay a form of reparations, where you do an amount of good for animals commensurate with your past harms, as well.  
• Sustainability: Sadly, as an article criticising our campaign points out, diet changes have high dropout rates. Conversely, it is low friction to maintain an automatic monthly donation. We see strong retention of our monthly donors (and of course, cancelling your monthly donation doesn’t mean you don’t continue to donate to help farmed animals through FarmKind or elsewhere)

To summarise: Veganism... good. Other ways of helping animals... also good. 

Giving people multiple options makes it more likely that they pick one, and take their first step on what we hope will be a lifelong journey of increasingly ambitious action for animals.

Aren’t you concerned about dissuading people from being vegan?

We recognize that many people -- including us -- have a gut-level negative reaction to the campaign's framing. But we are not the target audience, and our personal reactions aren't strong evidence about the campaign's impact on the people it was designed to influence. We encourage critics to distinguish between 'I personally dislike this' and 'I believe this will be net negative for animals.' The former is expected and largely irrelevant. The latter is important.

We take the possibility of dissuading people from being vegan very seriously. But we view the actual risk as low and far outweighed by the benefits. The rate and trend of veganism over time shows that most people aren’t vegan and aren’t about to be. Most individuals hold deeply entrenched views regarding their consumption of animal products, whereas their views on whether or where to donate are often much more flexible.

We believe the potential upside of reaching the non-vegan majority -- many of whom may be hearing for the first time that they can still take significant action against factory farming -- far outweighs the risk to the small minority of "diet swing voters". We believe this is true even considering the risk of people reading just the headline and not the message about donating: We find it hard to believe that a single provocative headline would materially shift someone's long-term moral or dietary convictions. If a "swing eater" claimed to be swayed by one headline, we’re skeptical they were seriously considering diet change in the first place. After all, if individual messages were capable of easily changing dietary choices, we would expect to see far more progress in traditional vegan outreach over the past several decades.

We want to emphasize that we could be wrong about this. We remain open to the possibility that our message might drive more people to stop being vegan than to donate and if we had reason to suspect that this risk was high, we would respond accordingly. However, we don’t think that the prima facie case for this risk is strong, given what is already known about public attitudes to veganism and diet change.

We agree with those who argue that ending factory farming in the long term may require a substantial shift toward veganism and widespread positive public sentiment. However, we believe that a typical tabloid reader’s perception of veganism is far more entrenched than their views on whether to donate to charities working to reform an inhumane industry. Donating funds things like alternative proteins, institutional meat reduction and corporate campaigns. We believe that funding these interventions helps change the food environment such that veganism is more convenient, relatively cheaper, and more ‘normal, natural and nice’, making veganism more socially acceptable and sustainable for the average person later on.

As an aside, we suspect that donating may be a promising on-ramp to diet change in the long-term. Our actions aren’t simply downstream of beliefs: Our actions can change our beliefs. Forthcoming research from Samantha Kassirer supports the view that getting people to take even trivially small actions for farmed animals can increase their moral sympathy towards them 6 months later. A similar phenomenon is often at play when people who change their diet for non-moral reasons later become convinced by the moral argument: Once we start taking action on an issue (like factory farming) we have less reason to avoid thinking about it and less dissonance in seeing ourselves differently (e.g. as pro-animal). That makes us more open to further actions. We discuss this further here.

Have you measured whether you’re dissuading people from being vegan or supporting animal advocacy?

We did not prepare this measurement in advance because, as explained above, we think this risk is likely to be low. However we do take the risk seriously, and so we are talking with MEL advisors like The Mission Motor, seeking their advice on whether there is a right-sized way to measure this going forward.

It is worth noting that we have not yet encountered a vegan advocacy organization that systematically measures whether its messaging might inadvertently dissuade people from -- or hurt their perception of -- veganism or other animal advocacy, nor have we seen anyone calling for them to do so. While the evidence on backfire effects in advocacy is often mixed and highly context-dependent, there are certainly reasons to worry that some “go vegan” messaging could be counterproductive:

• Potential for denial: The "meat paradox" suggests a tension between a person’s care for animals and their consumption of them (Bastian & Loughnan, 2017^[10]; Loughnan, Haslam, & Bastian, 2010^[11]). Some psychological models suggest that when a high-barrier dietary change is presented as the only resolution, individuals may manage the resulting cognitive dissonance by rationalizing their habits or minimizing the perceived suffering of animals (Bastian et al., 2012)^[12].

• Perceived inefficacy: When advocacy focuses on the consumer frame and individual boycotts (veganism), it may lead to a sense of learned helplessness. If individuals believe that their personal dietary choices are the only lever for change, but perceive that the rest of the world will continue as usual, they may conclude that the problem is unsolvable (Salomon, Preston, & Tannenbaum, 2017)^[13]. This can lead to despair and disengagement rather than action (Landry et al., 2018^[14]; Gifford, 2011^[15]).

• Psychological reactance: Direct moral commands are often perceived as threats to personal autonomy and identity (Brehm, 1966^[16]). This can trigger a boomerang effect, where individuals reassert their freedom by doubling down on the criticized behavior or developing active hostility toward the messenger (Dillard & Shen, 2005^[17]; Quick & Stephenson, 2008^[18]). A recent experimental study found that forceful admonitions to stop eating meat for health reasons caused participants to pay more attention to, and even seek out, meat-related information—demonstrating how reactance can bias attention toward the very behavior being discouraged (Sprengholz, Tannert, & Betsch, 2023^[19]). This defiance may be a significant driver of the animosity some feel toward vegans and by association animal advocates.

As a movement, we should be consistent in our demands for empirical rigor. Just as FarmKind should put our assumptions under the microscope, we believe it is equally important to test the assumption that typical vegan advocacy is net-positive.

Why not just do something much more nuanced?

The mainstream media rarely provides a platform for nuance. We considered various media hooks and have experimented with less controversial approaches, both independently and with PR agency support. They failed to gain significant traction.

When we start talking about factory farming, the script in people's minds is that we're about to ask them to change their diet -- so they stop listening. We used to get comments like "I'm not going to go vegan, I love bacon too much" on videos where we weren't talking about veganism at all. To reach many people, we need to make it explicitly clear we're not asking them to go vegan.

Why did you pitch to tabloids and right-wing outlets?

As mentioned earlier, the aim was to cause outlets that normally are silent on the issue of factory farming and critical of Veganuary (see here, here and here) to have a more productive conversation about which action people should choose to combat factory farming this year, instead of whether to do anything about it at all. This tabloid coverage wasn't expected to drive significant donations directly, but to springboard us to a major TV appearance. For context, last year's Dwarkesh podcast appearance raised over $2.5M -- a single high-profile media hit can be transformative. Our target was something like Piers Morgan.

As mentioned earlier, we pivoted mid-campaign to mitigate infighting risk, and this more mild-mannered approach caused our GB News interview to go unuploaded and our LBC interview to go unaired, killing our momentum toward that goal.

We didn’t pitch outlets like Guardian because they typically write positive stories about Veganuary (e.g. these two this year) which we had no interest in co-opting.

Conclusion

We ran a provocative campaign that generated significant controversy and modest donations. We made real mistakes in execution, particularly around stakeholder consultation, and are genuinely sorry for any distress this caused to Veganuary staff and others who felt blindsided.

We still believe that experimenting with ways to mobilize the non-vegan majority is important and under-explored. When people learn they can start taking meaningful action for farmed animals without overhauling their diet, doors open that would otherwise stay closed. We'll continue pursuing that goal, with better coordination next time.

If you've read this far, thank you for hearing us out.

1. ^{^}

   This includes estimated value of recurring donations based on our historical retention rates

2. ^{^}

   We expected TV to drive donations more reliably than news articles for a number of reasons, including a) the readership of articles across sites is very ‘spikey’; b) audiences self-select by reading headlines and not clicking the article which means a higher proportion of readers are likely to come to an article with pre-existing strong views on a given topic; c) TV allows us to put forward our message more directly without the filter of a journalist’s write up which would likely leave out our direct ‘call to action’.

3. ^{^}

   To clarify: This was our goal. We are not claiming that this was a goal shared by us and Veganuary.

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We changed this at Veganuary’s request, as their legal advisers were concerned that if they didn’t contest the use of their Trademark, it could weaken their legal position in the future if a non-aligned company or organization were to use our name in a similar way.

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The Daily Mail changed the headline and made other small edits without consulting us.

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Unlike many of our fundraising efforts which involve matching codes that make it easy to precisely identify donations, this one is harder. We estimated donations attributable to this campaign by looking at donations that (a) occurred after the first news coverage and before January 18th, (b) came from donor who had never donated through our platform before, (c) weren’t attributable to any other source [i.e. they didn’t use a matching code and they didn’t choose one of our other campaign when answering the “where did you first come across FarmKind?” question in the optional post-donation survey]. Our less conservative estimate counted all donations meeting these three requirements. Our conservative estimate only counted donations which either (a) were made through the offset calculator widget, (b) said they heard of us in a news article, or (c) donated a very specific number that very likely came from our calculator e.g. $209. We manually excluded 10 donations for which we have evidence that they weren’t caused by this campaign. If you’re wondering why we don’t just look at donations made through the offset calculator widget, the answer is that we know from our donor interviews that many (likely most) people who discover us through the calculator complete their donation through our standard donation widget.

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The campaign took roughly 2 FTE months of staff time. Costed at the average salary of the staff members involved, that’s a fully loaded cost of $8,817. Eater sponsorships cost $10,081. Total cost is roughly $18,098

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As for the rest of the team, we never ask job applicants about their diet because we strongly believe that it’s not important. What’s important is: Are they the people who will do the most to fix factory farming in this role? The good one can do for animals in their job is independent of (and has the potential to be hundreds of times higher than) the good they can do through their diet. Moreover, as a donation platform aimed at marketing to the majority of the population who aren’t vegan, ruling out candidates unless they aren’t in our target audience would be ill-advised. Nonetheless, this is something we get asked about regularly (see example).

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A 2017 survey from the Sentience Institute found that 69% agree that “factory farming of animals is one of the most important social issues in the world today”, with 49% supporting banning it altogether. Faunalytics finds that if you look at specific industry standard practices, levels of opposition are even higher, ranging from 71 to 85%.

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Bastian, B., & Loughnan, S. (2017). Resolving the Meat-Paradox: A Motivational Account of Morally Troublesome Behavior and Its Maintenance.

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Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Bastian, B. (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals.

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Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Radke, H. R. M. (2012). Don't Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption

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Salomon, E., Preston, J. L., & Tannenbaum, M. B. (2017). Climate Change Helplessness and the (De)moralization of Individual Energy Behavior.

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Landry, N., Gifford, R., Milfont, T. L., Weeks, A., & Arnocky, S. (2018). Learned helplessness moderates the relationship between environmental concern and behavior.

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Gifford, R. (2011). The dragons of inaction: Psychological barriers that limit climate change mitigation and adaptation.  

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Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance.

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Dillard, J. P., & Shen, L. (2005). On the nature of reactance and its role in persuasive health communication.

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Quick, B. L., & Stephenson, M. T. (2008). Examining the role of trait reactance and sensation seeking on perceived threat, state reactance, and reactance restoration.

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Sprengholz, P., Tannert, S., & Betsch, C. (2023). Explaining boomerang effects in persuasive health communication: How psychological reactance to healthy eating messages elevates attention to unhealthy food. Journal of Health Communication

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