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.

Jack

Jack at home.

We first met six months ago. He was friendly and cute; inquisitive and demanding. By our third meeting, he had me give him my full attention, playing with toys and petting him continuously. Soon afterward, when I became his housemate, I would feed him twice a day and sometimes share a bed with him. We interacted daily -- him by purring, me by talking. We had become not just housemates, but close friends. Family.

This morning, he woke me up by jumping atop me, and then curling up against my head. I stroked his fur before even opening my eyes. Two hours later, while at work, I received news: Jack had died.

It was a wholly unexpected death. He was at the vet getting his teeth cleaned. He never woke from the anesthesia.

A sudden death like this is especially upsetting. He was only six years old. Far too young. I already feel the lack of him in my life, and I only just got the news an hour ago.

Jack loved attention.

It is harder, of course, for those who knew him longer than I. I was only the latest in an ever growing family who cared for him. Katherine is distraught. Many others have already expressed their deep sympathies. But I'm worried most about Jasper.

Jasper has been by Jack's side for years. They have not been apart for more than 24 hours in years. They have been constantly in each other's presence for 364 days each year since 2008. But Jasper is a cat, and so does not know English. He cannot view the body. I do not know how to explain to him that his adoptive brother has died.

This is a sad day for me. More so for Katherine. But for Jasper, it will be mostly confusing, I think. Which is a sad situation all its own.

Jack in the box.

And to Jack, whose consciousness has now passed, let me say that I am sorry your life has ended. Death is the most terrible of all evils. We must do what we can to combat this foe, and in your name I will take a small step by donating $250 to Vegan Outreach, one of the two most effective charities listed on Effective Animal Activism that help to avert the unnecessary suffering and death of non-human animals like Jack. According to the best research we have, this should help to alleviate between 15 and 25,000 years of nonhuman animal suffering. I trust Peter Hurford's estimate the most, which says that my $250 donation should result in approximately 17,280 total years of suffering averted.

In the meantime, I must comfort Katherine and try to get across what has happened to Jasper. This is not a fun day.

Jack and Jasper wishing me a happy birthday earlier this month.

Goodbye, Jack. You are loved. You are family. <3