Angel Charity Highlight: Animal Ethics
In this series, we highlight Angel’s partner charities and their incredible teams and programs. All charities in this series have taken a revolutionary step toward sustainable giving; a direction we believe is the future of a better world.
Today, the spotlight is on Animal Ethics where we’ll get your questions answered by the charity’s own, co-Founder Leah McKelvie, about how you can make a difference.
What is Animal Ethics?
Animal Ethics promotes respect for nonhuman animals through education and outreach, including a resource website, conferences, university courses, and providing materials for high school classes. Through our website content, videos, and social media we reach broader audiences.
We support and spread information about interventions to improve the lives of animals in the wild, such as vaccinations and helping animals in natural disasters. We explore how future technologies will enable us to avoid catastrophic risks and ways technology can be used to help wild animals on a large scale.
Our vision is a world where all sentient beings are given moral consideration.
Why do we focus on animals living in the wild? Because that’s where most animals live!
Wow, you guys are busy. Can people see your annual reports?
Of course. Here are our annual reports of the past 4 years:
- Animal Ethics 2020 Annual Report
- Animal Ethics 2019 Annual Report
- Animal Ethics 2018 Annual Report
- Animal Ethics 2017 Annual Report
What will my contribution provide to the animals?
We’ll use the contributions from Angel Protocol donors to produce content about using technology to help wild animals. This includes information about new and existing types of data collection, advances in deep learning and other methods of data analysis, concrete examples of current interventions and emerging possibilities, and risk analysis.
Why is this needed?
There is a lack of curated information about using technology to help wild animals cope with natural harms. That is what this project addresses.
But we don’t do field research or any kind of scientific research ourselves. Instead, we gather and review the disparate work that has already been done so we can provide an overview that is accessible to the general public. It could also be useful background information for scientists and academics.
The purpose is to address the lack of awareness and support for using technology to help animals living in the wild.
We believe that if we don’t start addressing this lack of awareness now, it will likely be the biggest obstacle to helping animals in the future — more than technological, funding, or logistical challenges.
In times of crisis, people tend to adopt the kinds of solutions they already know about. We focus on technologies and interventions that are easy to understand on a high level.
We’ve found that many people have never thought about helping animals in the wild, and while people who hear about it are generally sympathetic to the cause, they tend to believe it’s not possible to help on a large scale without doing more harm than good.
This easy-to-consume content will show the current and future possibilities for helping wild animals, which are much greater than most people imagine.
We have seen something similar with climate change, where despite the complexity of the problem the world is coming up with solutions that no one ever imagined or thought possible. Much of the same knowledge and technology can be applied to helping wild animals themselves, not just their ecosystems.
Each web page we create will review the current state of information about a topic and show how it can be applied to helping wild animals.
For $1,500 we can produce a page about topics related to methods of data collection and analysis (camera traps, thermal imaging, eDNA, etc.).
For $2,000-$2,500 we can create a page about a more complex topic such as ecological forecasting, or specific interventions to help wild animals.
These pages will help animals in the long term by serving as resources for visitors to our website and providing material for use in our videos and outreach.
Where can I learn more about the problem?
There aren’t many sources that examine the issue of harms in the wild from the perspective of how the animals as individuals are affected by them. One of the main reasons we formed Animal Ethics was to fill this gap.
Most of our sources of information come from scientific and academic work on very narrow topics, and the animals are usually studied for reasons other than wild animal welfare. So, we collect a lot of this information and present it in an accessible way with a focus on the welfare of the animals themselves.
We give an overview of the natural harms that animals suffer in the wild on our Situation of animals page. It contains links to other pages with more information.
The Wikipedia page on wild animal suffering also gives a good introduction to the problem and the variety of views about it. The first section about the extent of suffering in nature covers the issues we address. There are many academic references there as well if people want to learn more about a specific topic.
Later this year we’ll publish a literature review and bibliography on topics related to non-invasively observing animals and using technology to help wild animals.
People can sign up for our newsletter to be notified when they are published.
How can I get ahold of you?
The best way is to use our contact form or email info@animal-ethics.org and then you’ll be directed to the right person. For information about this specific project, you can contact the project manager Zoë at zoe.gumm@animal-ethics.org.
And how can I follow along with the organization’s on-goings?
Twice a year we publish updates about what we are currently working on. We’ll publish the next update next month. We also have a newsletter.
Here are links to our English website, YouTube channel, and social media. We have some of these in Spanish, Portuguese, and French as well but the list would become very long. You can get those on the website home page for each language.
- Animal Ethics website (for all languages)
- YouTube
Thanks Leah, that was really informative.
About Angel Protocol:
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