4 Urgent projects you can fund in Animal Welfare

Time-sensitive ideas in 2026

I help people in San Francisco spend money well in animal welfare. I am the SF lead for Senterra Funders. You can reach me at itsi@senterrafunders.org.

The animal welfare crisis is always urgent. Just looking at chickens, it’s 90 billion a year that are put through the hellish conditions of the average factory farm. That’s a bit over 170,000 every minute. And that number is growing rapidly.

That being said, some projects are more time-sensitive. For instance, if you think AI will be a Big Deal, then a few things need to happen now.

Animal welfare is primarily funding constrained (as I mentioned in Animal Welfare is everyone’s second favorite thing), and this is a big problem for urgent projects because it involves reprioritizing away from other very effective projects.

You should give to funds

Because animal welfare is funding constrained, all the funds only spend on urgent things. Between the main funds they estimate they can take in an extra $120M in 2026. We are nowhere close to this amount. If you think AI will be transformational in the short term, there are a few reasonable positions you could take.

The Navigation Fund

My personal take is that it is critical to build as much movement, institutional, and political power as we can over the next few years so we can do the most and navigate transformational change. The Navigation Fund is run by ruthless badasses who have been behind the largest wins in the animal movement.

The EA Animal Welfare Fund

Another conclusion you could come to is that the future is unpredictable so you might want to do as much suffering prevention as you can with the money you have now. EA AWF focuses on neglected regions like the global south, and neglected species like aquatic animals and invertebrates. Time-critical work do includes are things like stopping insect farming while it’s in its infancy.

The other main fund you could consider is Coefficient Giving’s Farm Animal Welfare Fund run by Lewis Bollard. It is a great option. It’s also much better funded than the others, and isn’t funding some of the projects that the other grantmakers are. So I put it lower on my list at this second.

Some specific urgent projects you can fund

1. Stopping the EATS Act

Details: The Navigation Fund’s report

Target: $1.5M

If it doesn’t get funded: reversal of 90% of legal progress

The House Agricultural Committee is trying to include an act in the Farm Bill that stops states from regulating standards for agricultural products sold in their state. This is insane and undemocratic, and would undo almost all legislative progress on animal welfare. At least 24 House Republicans have opposed it. The problem is that people need to pass the Farm Bill for the country to function, so it might pass anyway. It will be voted on sometime between late April and September, and you can make sure it dies.

2. Seeding the Falcon Fund for AI x Animals projects

Details: The Falcon Fund

Target: $2M

If it doesn’t get funded: potentially catastrophic, enormous-scale suffering

AI systems are probably going to be running factory farms, doing lab testing, making catering decisions, recommending which pesticides to use, and much, much more. Animals need to be considered, or things will get even more hellish for them. This area of AI Safety is incredibly neglected and underfunded. This new fund will be active grantmaking to make sure at least the basics happen: getting animals considered in model specs, building out benchmarks, and monitoring for real-world AI use that affects animals. Marcus, who’s running the fund, has donated over 400k in the last year to urgent animal welfare projects because he takes AI urgency extremely seriously. You could be the person to put this fund into the world!

3. Ending chicken cages in the US

Details: The Navigation Fund’s Global Fund to End Cages

Target: $20M

If it doesn’t get funded: locking in cages for at least the medium-term future

Incredibly, the animal welfare movement has been able to get to almost 50% of eggs sold in the US being cage-free. The last holdout is grocery. A few weeks ago, animal welfare groups got the 4th largest supermarket conglomerate in the US, Ahold Delhaize, to commit to stop selling eggs from caged hens in their stores, and publish a public roadmap. They are immediately jumping to the next target, Kroger! Moving now means all the people and strategies are in place with a lot of momentum, and it gives very little time for the industry to mount a defense.

Edit: since drafting this, they also got Target to announce they are going cage-free. The momentum effect is incredible.

4. Insect farming: shaping the trajectory of this nascent industry

Details: Contact me for more details

Target: $1.5M

If it doesn’t get funded: potentially the largest form of factory farming going very poorly

Insect farming is enormous. There are currently around 1T farmed per year, with projections going as high as 4T by 2030, with most of the demand being to turn them into feed for other factory farmed animals. It is likely that the species involved in insect farming are sentient. Funding here could help shape the industry’s trajectory and mitigate some of the worst welfare harms. It will never be so cheap to prevent so much harm.

Piloting New Projects

We need to get many new projects off the ground to be prepared for large influxes of funding. The main funds are prioritizing this. Incubators for megaprojects and other critical projects are in the works: these include the Sentient Futures Fellowship, Yaqi Grover’s new Myrias Studio, and some other upcoming ones around humane tech.

These are very exciting. If you like the idea of piloting projects, put money into the main funds.

Political Giving

There are a few time-sensitive policy projects and political giving opportunities on both sides of the aisle. Message me and I’ll connect you with the people involved.