There are countless animal charities all across the world. This can make it pretty hard to pick just one whom you could imagine volunteering your unique, individual skills and resources or to find one you feel you can trust and want to make donations.

Which Organisation to SUPPORT?

What if you’re unsure which animal charity best represents your concerns or spends the money you donate most effectively? Check out animalcharityevaluators.org (ACE). ACE helps people find highly effective charities to ensure their donations make an impact.

Animal Charity Evaluators

To provide information about interventions and to give recommendations for top charities, ACE analyses research done on methods for helping animals.
They offer advice for effective animal advocacy and provide career, charity, and volunteering suggestions.
The organisation categorises animal charities according to their type of work and the key issues they are concerned with – a helpful tool for deciding which animal charity to support.

ANIMAL WELFARE OR ANIMAL RIGHTS?

Animal Charities care for animals. But two interest groups are working in this field: those concerned with "animal welfare" and those concerned with "animal rights". Their approaches and ideologies are fundamentally different: It is all about our understanding of the right of humans to use animals.

Animal Welfare

"Animal welfare endorses the responsible use of animals to satisfy specific human needs – from companionship and sport to uses that involve the taking of life, such as for food, clothing, and medical research.
Animal welfare advocates seek to ensure that all animals used by humans have their basic needs fulfilled in terms of food, shelter, and health and that they experience no unnecessary suffering in providing for human needs".
(States United for Biomedical Research (SUBR))

Animal Rights

"One of the basic tenets of animal rights is that humans do not have a right to use non-human animals for their purposes, which include food, clothing, entertainment and vivisection.
This is based on a rejection of speciesism and the knowledge that animals are sentient beings".
(Doris Lin - animal rights attorney & director of Legal Affairs for the Animal Protection League of New Jersey)

ANIMAL LAW

Animal law differs from country to country. The Swiss-based organisation GAL (Global Animal Law), globalanimallaw.org, compiles animal law globally and proposes optimised versions of current legislation.

GAL also maintains a database for animal welfare legislation (AWLD), a collection of animal legislation at every level worldwide.