ACE Interviews: Matt Ball

This entry was originally posted on the AnimalCharityEvaluators.org blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

ACE Interviews: Matt Ball

This blog post is a part of our ACE Interviews series where ACE conducts interviews with activist leaders, charity representatives, influential funders, academic researchers, and other experts. Our interviews touch on several aspects of animal advocacy and serve as an outside view that helps showcase issues that we might otherwise miss on our own.

We’re kicking off our ACE Interview series with an interview of Matt Ball, who co-founded and served as executive director of Vegan Outreach for over twenty years. Our interview with Matt covers several topics related to utilitarianism, leafleting, research, and popularity. Here are a few highlights from the interview:

5. What role do you think research will play in the future of animal advocacy?

I obviously hate to say it, but I think research will not play as significant a role in the future of animal advocacy as it could or should. This is not just because of the difficulty of getting honest, statistically-significant, meaningful, long-term, prescriptive data. Rather, it is because there are relatively few individuals who are truly motivated by maximum impact.

You will always be able to raise orders of magnitude more money for dogs and cats than for unseen billions of factory-farmed birds. You will always be able to raise more far money from tragedies and high-profile cases of cruelty than for grassroots education. You will always be able to get more people interested in short-term campaigns than leafleting and teaching. You will always excite far more vegans by praising veganism rather than discussing effective first-step advocacy to new people.

This is just human nature. And we hurt animals when we ignore human nature.

Research results – regardless of if they are honest, relevant, scalable, significant, and universal – may shuffle the relatively few dollars from a handful of strict utilitarians, but they won’t change human nature. If we want to do our absolute best for the animals, we have to work with people where they are – members and the public alike – rather from where we want them to be.

11. If you were to start over in your advocacy career, what are two or three things that you would do differently?

I wrote two books (The Animal Activist's Handbook and The Accidental Activist) and only covered some of this!

1. Be very careful with what you believe and choose to present to the public. There aren't many honest sources of information, and, as humans, we're quick to believe what we want to believe, and dismiss anything else.

It would have been hard for me to learn this 25 years ago, because I was the epitome of this problem. I was singularly concerned with defending myself / my veganism, rather than actually pursuing effective advocacy to help animals. I believed, and parroted, everything and anything that seemed remotely pro-veg or anti-meat.

Unfortunately, this continues today, with many vegans focused on what makes them feel justified and/or popular with other vegans. For example, Ginny Messina, RD, checks studies promoted by various animal advocacy groups. When she actually reads the anti-red-meat papers (this one, for example), some of these studies also say eating chicken is health-neutral or even beneficial! Think about that – animal advocates promoting studies that show eating chickens is beneficial, just because the study showed negative consequences for red meat.

2. Realize we are going to win. It won't come about from some vegans demanding others go vegan. Rather, we will create the new world we desire through continued constructive and realistic outreach that helps more people take the first steps to help animals. And then the next steps. And to maintain those changes.

Change is occurring and will continue to occur through outreach that is psychologically sound, based in the real world, and integrated into our capitalist society. And then we build methodically on every step and change the world piece by piece.

You can read the full interview on the Conversations and Interviews section of our site.

ACE Highlight: Donation Policy

This entry was originally posted on the AnimalCharityEvaluators.org blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

This Week's ACE Highlight: Donation Policy

This blog post is a part of our ACE Highlight series which draws attention to timely and relevant pages on our site. Look for it on the first and third Thursday of every month.

Like all nonprofit organizations, we need donations to survive. However, it is important that we separate our donation sources from our policy decisions. To this end, we enforce a donation conflict of interest policy that restricts which donations we may accept from potential donors.

This policy not only helps us to avoid a conflict of interest, but also helps us to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. We want to ensure that our evaluation process never has the perception of influence from outside organizations that we might plausibly recommend.

You can read more about our donation policy on our website.

Our goal is to move many times our annual budget to our recommended charities, and this policy will help to make our recommendations strong enough to achieve this. If you’d like to donate toward our work, you can support us by giving online. We are very grateful to all those who help to support Animal Charity Evaluators.

Jobs and Internships Available

This entry was originally posted on the AnimalCharityEvaluators.org blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

Interested in an internship at ACE? Now's the time to apply!

We're looking for talented people to help us to find and promote the best ways to help animals. We have a wide variety of internship opportunities available, including openings with research, operations, development, and even our communications team. If you think you have what it takes, then apply to join us for three months (with a possibility of extension). You can make a real difference in bringing the effective altruist mindset to the world of animal advocacy.

Plus, if you're looking for additional opportunities, the Centre for Effective Altruism is also hiring! Their open positions include a Director of Development, a Careers Analyst, interns for their Graduate Volunteer Scheme, and many more. CEA is home to Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, two great organizations working in effective altruism. To find out more about CEA's employment opportunities, apply on their site by February 28, 2014.

If you know of anyone who is looking to make a serious difference as part of the effective altruism movement, please send them a link to this blog entry. Whether they apply for a position with ACE or one with CEA, you could help to make a huge difference in their lives.

Speciesism and Human Rights

This entry was originally posted on the AnimalCharityEvaluators.org blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

Each year, Blog Action Day organizes bloggers across the world to write on a single topic to raise awareness of an important issue that impacts us all. Last year, the topic was on The Power of We, for which I wrote a short post on how effective altruism magnifies our power to accomplish good.

This year, the topic is Human Rights. While Effective Animal Activism [now Animal Charity Evaluators] does not focus on human rights issues specifically, I feel that this nevertheless marks an excellent opportunity to talk about why human rights, as a concept, does not do justice to the nonhuman persons that also deserve consideration, and how this principle affects our activism.

Our world is not ideal, and many humans are currently oppressed. But I suspect “human rights” is a poor concept to apply when we talk about the proper consideration of these oppressed peoples’ interests. It may be true that many oppressed peoples have uttered the phrase “we’re human, too,” but they did so just as wrongly as when Susan B. Anthony wrote that two million black men (“the lowest orders of manhood”) were inferior to fifteen million white women. We should not improperly denigrate other worthwhile causes while we work on our own, and when people speak of human rights, they perpetuate the misguided idea that what counts is whether the subject is human. It is no more right for today's activists to claim that oppressed humans deserve to not be oppressed because they are human than it was for Anthony to claim that white women deserved the vote because they were white.

Peter Singer’s excellent essay, All Animals Are Equal, really hammers in this point, but speciesism nevertheless remains a problem for many activists. Even some in the effective altruism movement have speciesist tendencies, which is quite unfortunate.

For animal activists, combating speciesism aims toward an important goal, but it isn’t always effective. Meme-spreading is worthwhile depending on the cost involved. Refraining from framing oppression in terms of human rights doesn’t cost us very much, but arguing with a dedicated speciesist who isn’t already convinced by the easy arguments may be a waste of time.

How We Should Act

As important as anti-speciesism may be, there is another side to this issue: respecting other causes while working on our own.

It was wrong when Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton resorted to racism to help their cause, and it is wrong when today’s human rights activists resort to speciesism to help theirs. But it is also wrong when we, as animal activists, resort to methods that harm other causes.

This is why we should take care when we choose how to go about advocating for animal welfare. There is divided opinion on whether veg*n activists should use health arguments, but hopefully we can agree not to use body-shaming to promote veg*nism. Addressing size discrimination might not be a priority of effective altruism, but that’s no reason for animal activists to make the same mistake Anthony and Stanton did when they resorted to racism to help their cause.

“Human rights” is the wrong concept to apply because all of us are important, even if some of us have it worse than others. We can do our part by respecting all subjects, even while concentrating our efforts where they will be most effective.

Humane League Labs

This entry was originally posted on the AnimalCharityEvaluators.org blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

One of our top two rated organizations, The Humane League, has recently introduced Humane League Labs, an initiative aimed at original research on veg*n advocacy effectiveness.

We’re very excited to see The Humane League expand into this space. Although our current recommendation for them is solely due to their direct veg*n advocacy work, we feel that effectiveness research combined with direct advocacy is potentially more effective.

We look forward to collaborating with The Humane League as their new project matures. At the moment, we are already in the design phase of our Humane Education Study, in which we will be working directly with The Humane League and other organizations on determining the effectiveness of humane education presentations.

Open discussion on studies performed by Humane League Labs are encouraged in our forum, such as the recent discussion on their leafleting study. We will be providing updates as these studies complete.

It is very encouraging to see groups taking an active interest in research, and we encourage all readers to keep an eye on Humane League Labs to learn about effective advocacy tactics.