Your donation to Animal Ethics can be matched on November 30
Your donation to Animal Ethics can now be matched. Any donation to Animal Ethics up to US$100 made at our Every.org profile will be matched until funds expire. There’s still time!
Click here to get your donation matched at Every.org
If you want to donate more, it will be possible to get your donation matched next week. Giving Tuesday is Tuesday, November 30 this year and if you donate to us through Facebook’s Giving Tuesday your donation will be matched by Facebook up to 100%.
In addition, those donations that won’t get matched by Facebook will be matched anyway up to US$ 10,000 thanks to the contributions of three generous donors.
Click here to get your donation matched by Facebook
With the continuing challenges of the pandemic, your support is especially needed at this time. It will help us to continue to do outreach to help wild animals and allow us to create more much-needed educational materials.
You can read the details about our current work in what Animal Ethics is currently working on. In this blog post we’ll provide some highlights of what we’ve accomplished this year and give a brief overview of what’s to come.
We did a major update to our Ethics and animals section of the website. In addition, we added three new pages on prioritarianism, negative consequentialism, and suffering-focused ethics, all of which give more weight to alleviating the worst conditions than on overall or average wellbeing.
We’ve just published a report about the welfare of wild urban animals including field mice, pigeons, and iguanas. It draws on information from diverse fields such as urban ecology, wild animal welfare, and population ecology. This detailed report looks at some of the major factors affecting the welfare of urban animals, with an emphasis on how these factors affect the lives of animals from five different species.
This year we also wrote about several topics in invertebrate sentience, including an illustrated physiology of invertebrate nervous systems showing degrees of centralization. We produced a literature review about the behavioral evidence for sentience in invertebrates such as behaviors that could indicate learning and others that could be pain reactions. Although the science of invertebrate suffering is still young, these kinds of anatomical and behavioral indicators can help us estimate the capacity for consciousness. Two other publications give overviews of what we know about the development of sentience in juvenile animals and about sentience in snails and bivalves.
We have upcoming publications about using thermal imaging to help detect the presence of wild animals and to diagnose illness and injury. We’re also working on a report about the feasibility of vaccinating bison in Yellowstone National Park in the USA. Large vaccinations are well studied and have been successful on a large scale around the world. Our team in India is writing about what we can learn from elephant vocalizations and how floods impact wild animals in India.
We’re partnering with Aula Animal to develop unique educational materials introducing speciesism to high school students. The materials include videos, worksheets, games, and Anki decks. These materials will be used in classrooms first in Spain and then throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
Next year we’ll also publish two papers about taking a longtermist approach and strategic considerations when doing outreach about wild animal suffering. Both of these will give insight on how to prioritize work to help wild animals and how to frame the message for different audiences.
We are continuing our academic research around the world. Most of our outreach efforts moved online starting last year, and we provided seminars and workshops for activists, interviews, and talks to both academic audiences and activists. This includes academic courses in Brazil on the subject of wild animal suffering. We gave talks about challenging speciesism to mark the annual World Day for an End to Speciesism. Our series of live talks took place on YouTube in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. An Animal Ethics representative attended the EA Global conference in London in October and gave a talk at Oxford University. We also have regular meetings with other organizations and individuals involved in helping wild animals. Our outreach continues to expand, particularly in India and Brazil.
Over the next year we will continue attending conferences, giving talks around the world, and teaching courses in Spain and Brazil. In addition, we are continuing our translations activities in French, Russian, Polish, Hindi, and Telegu.
Thanks again for helping to support all this work. Together we can continue to make the world a better place for nonhuman animals.
If you’d like to give, the Facebook GivingTuesday campaign is a great place to do it. Facebook is offering a 100% match for the first $2 million USD donated at that time, and a 10% match ($6 million USD) for the subsequent $60 million USD that are donated. There will be a match limit of $20,000 USD per donor and $100,000 USD per nonprofit.
Because there will be many people donating at that time, the matching campaign is expected to last for only a few seconds, so we encourage you to click on the Donate button right when it starts. Below is the time in different time zones.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021, at
8:00 a.m. EST
5:00 a.m. PST
Midnight AEST
14:00 pm CET (Europe)
13:00 UK
More information about how to participate is available here.
Get your donation matched by Facebook
If you prefer to donate directly, you can do so on our website. We also accept cryptocurrencies and NFT donations.
You can also contribute time. We are in need of people to help with social media, communications, and editing. Contact us to volunteer.
Thank you for your continued support!