Why We Don't Recommend Donating to Compassion in World Farming
Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) is an organization that claims to achieve significant impact.
For example, on their website CIWF claims that over 1.4 billion animals are set to benefit from the awards they gave to corporations:
At face value, this metric is impressive. However, this metric assumes that CIWF's awards actually cause corporations to change how they treat animals. And given that there are numerous reasons to believe this is not the case, we would expect the true impact of CIWF's awards to be virtually zero.
Conclusion
CIWF claims that over a billion animals are set to benefit from their work, but this metric is based on a favorable assumption.
And that's the core problem.
By making favorable assumptions, any amount of impact can be claimed—even if the true impact is zero.
For this reason, we do not consider CIWF's impact claims to be credible, and we do not recommend donating to them.
Endnote
CIWF also takes credit for delivering messages about animal welfare to over 27 billion consumers.
However, according to the United States Census Bureau, there are fewer than 10 billion people in the world, so we do not consider this claim from CIWF to be credible.
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