Farm sanctuaries primarily do advocacy in two ways:
At face value, this advocacy work seems great. However, there are several key issues with each of these forms of advocacy that limit their efficiency.
After a farm sanctuary collects footage, they usually post it on social media, and it's seen by their followers.
But people who actively follow farm sanctuaries are not a good target audience. Many of them already empathize with farm animals, and do not eat meat.
Meat eaters are the ones who should be shown the footage, since they are the ones who have the opportunity to stop supporting factory farming.
(Note: this problem is compounded by social media algorithms, which show content to people who already engage with similar material. This means that farm sanctuary videos are disproportionately shown to people who already care about farm animals.)
The cost to care for a single animal on a farm sanctuary can exceed $100,000.
This makes farm sanctuaries an extremely expensive option for producing footage, as they require massive budgets to produce content that pet owners are already producing for free.
Thousands of hours of happy cows, chickens, and pigs have already been recorded.
As a result, each new video yields less marginal value. Once there are 1,000 examples of happy pigs eating food, the 1,001st example does not reveal anything new.
The bottleneck isn't footage — there's already more than enough of it. The bottleneck is distribution.
Spending $20 on targeted Facebook ads can put existing happy chicken footage in front of thousands of meat eaters who would otherwise never see it.
In terms of advocacy, that's a better option than spending thousands of dollars to collect more footage that is similar to what already exists, and that will probably struggle to reach meat eaters.
Someone who decides to visit a farm sanctuary is disproportionately likely to already care about farm animals, and not eat meat.
As explained above, the cost to care for a single animal on a farm sanctuary can exceed $100,000.
This makes farm sanctuary visits very expensive to host, since maintaining the sanctuary itself requires a massive budget.
Accordingly, we consider targeted ad distribution to be a more cost-effective way to do animal advocacy than funding infrastructure for in-person farm sanctuary visits.
Farm sanctuary advocacy has a genuine strength: happy animals are intuitively relatable. Seeing a pig eat and play makes it easy to understand that they're individuals, just like dogs and cats. That's more convincing than holding up signs and yelling "meat is murder" — since it meets people where they are rather than demanding they accept a confrontational framing.
That said, there are limitations with farm sanctuary advocacy that lead us to conclude that it is less efficient at reaching and persuading meat eaters than other interventions.
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