The Humane League
Corporate Animal Welfare Campaigns
THL's corporate campaign programs promote farmed animal welfare through industry pressure and advocacy
What problem is The Humane League working on?
According to The Humane League, 94% of all animals raised for food are on factory farms. This means that 130 billion farmed land animals suffer every day. Chickens are one of the animal groups most affected, and often suffer in unimaginable ways, including by being kept in very small battery cages.
What does The Humane League do?
Through its corporate campaigns, the Humane League (THL) works relentlessly to end the abuse of chickens raised for food. Specifically:
- THL puts pressure on companies and corporations to improve welfare standards for chickens.
- THL promotes corporate campaigns internationally through its work with the Open Wing Alliance, which it founded in 2016.
- THL takes a highly collaborative approach to its advocacy. It trains individuals and organisations, shares resources, and works to make the animal advocacy movement more effective.
Why do we include The Humane League’s corporate campaign work on our list of recommended programs?
We recommend THL’s corporate campaign work based on four separate pieces of evidence:
- A 2023 evaluation and recommendation by Animal Charity Evaluators of The Humane League’s overall work.
- A 2018 evaluation by Founders Pledge of THL’s corporate campaigns’ cost-effectiveness at that point in time.
- A 2019 review by Rethink Priorities of the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare more generally.
- A direct referral from Open Philanthropy’s Farm Animal Welfare team — the largest funder in the impact-focused animal welfare space — on THL indeed currently being funding-constrained, i.e. that it has ample room to cost-effectively use marginal funds on corporate campaigns and that there aren’t strong diminishing returns to providing THL with extra funding.
For more on our decision to recommend The Humane League’s corporate campaigns — and why we made an exception to our usual approach of evaluating evaluators and directly relying on their recommendations — see our evaluation report on Animal Charity Evaluators.
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.