Considering how interventions1 in animal advocacy complement or detract from the goals of other movements can be useful for building alliances, advancing social causes, and reaching new audiences. There are multiple interventions that animal advocates can pursue in order to not only effect change for animals but also build alliances with other social movements, e.g., coalitions and multi-issue campaigns. Furthermore, there are less proactive but considerable ways to build alliances, such as being mindful of other social movements and cause areas when designing and implementing interventions—by selecting interventions that do not hinder the goals of other movements, we can avoid conflict and show solidarity with other social causes.

Every social movement engages in interventions that have the potential to affect other social movements in unique ways. Considering an initiative’s effect on other social movements should be a consistent practice within all movements, but in this post we’ll focus on animal advocacy and environmentalism specifically. In particular, we will examine two general types of interventions: (i) promoting reforms to agricultural systems and (ii) advocating for human dietary changes. It would also be valuable to examine interventions targeting wild animals, not only because such interventions often directly involve both movements, but also because the welfare of wild animals has the potential to be a top-priority cause area for animal advocates. However, due to significant uncertainties associated with wild animal welfare and the expected impact of interventions to promote it,2 we will focus exclusively on farmed animal advocacy in this piece.

Read the full article about building alliances with the environmental movement by Maria Salazar and Marianne van der Werf at Animal Charity Evaluators.