The Humane League
Corporate Animal Welfare Campaigns
THL's corporate campaigns program promotes 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.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of THL?1.
Evidence in favour of the cost-effectiveness of THL’s corporate campaign work includes:
- 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.
In 2023, we made an exception to our usual approach of evaluating evaluators and directly relying on their recommendations, and included THL’s corporate campaigns in our list of recommendations, despite the program not being recommended by one of our vetted evaluators. We now consider the evidence we relied on for this recommendation to be out of date and decided in our 2024 round of evaluations that we could not justify going beyond the scope of our evaluating evaluators project to potentially renew the THL recommendation.
To be clear that our decision does not reflect any negative update on THL’s work. Instead this is reflective of evidence being out of date and us maintaining the scope of the evaluating evaluators project.
For more on our 2023 decision to recommend The Humane League’s corporate campaigns — and why we made an exception to our usual approach— see our 2023 evaluation report on Animal Charity Evaluators. For more information on our 2024 decision to discontinue our recommendation of THL see our page on our 2024 evaluator research.
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.