EA - Report: The Broken State of Animal Advocacy in Universities by Dr Faraz Harsini

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Report: The Broken State of Animal Advocacy in Universities, published by Dr Faraz Harsini on August 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
The following report is also available at the website of Allied Scholars for Animal Protection.
Background
This study examined the state of animal advocacy and number of events held by vegan and animal advocacy student groups at the top 100 U.S. universities. Our central research questions were:
How many events were held to educate students, especially non- vegans, on veganism and animal welfare?
Why is animal advocacy ineffective in universities? Why is animal advocacy unsustainable in universities?
How many advocacy events were held recently by university student groups?
What can we learn from other student organizations in building a sustainable movement?
We also conducted a qualitative survey of several influential animal advocacy professionals regarding their views on the state of campus animal advocacy.
Thanks to the following individuals for their contributions and insights:
Dr. Courtney Dillard, Mercy for Animals
Nicole Rawling, JD, Material Innovation Initiative
Aidan Kanyoku, Pax Fauna
Zoe Rosenberg, Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary
Sebastian Quaade, Climate Refarm
Kenzie Bushman, Better Food Foundation
Jenna Holakovsky, Farm Sanctuary
Key Findings
1. Most college animal advocacy organizations are inactive, indicating a lack of sustainability. While 76% of top colleges once had active animal rights organizations, only 16% of colleges have an active group, and fewer than 10% of colleges had groups that held more than a single event in the first five months of 2023.
2. Most active organizations held only one or two events per semester. Of 16 active universities, just four held more than a couple events, and just two held more than three events between January and May of 2023.
3. The top 10 universities are similarly inactive and are even less effective. Of these, 70% saw no animal rights activism, and none held more than two events in Spring 2023.
4. The time is now for a united front in college animal rights activism. Even our nation's top universities have been unable to host consistent, effective, enduring animal rights activism or animal advocacy events on their campuses. In fact, the vast majority host none at all. We have no reason to believe this will improve on its own.
Method Overview
We searched college animal rights activist events on Google, Instagram, and Facebook. If a university's student group advertised at least one event in the most recent semester at the time of this study (Spring 2023, ranging from January 1st to May 31st, 2023) it was considered active. Otherwise, it was considered inactive.
We defined an animal rights event as any organized action intended to educate non-activists about farm or laboratory animal exploitation and help them take corrective action, e.g. go vegan or reduce consumption of animal products. This includes movie nights, discussion sessions, seminar speakers, outreach to mobilize currently non-activist vegans, etc.
We excluded events that only addressed the environment, healthy living, plant-based cooking, etc. Our reasoning is that if animal exploitation does not come up at all, it is not animal advocacy.
We excluded vegan socials, meetings targeted at existing activists, and events only focused on companion animals, e.g. dogs and cats. We contend that these do not contribute directly to animal liberation.[1]
We excluded law school organizations and events because these are usually not available to the entire student body and typically serve a niche community in graduate schools.
The list of top 100 universities is from U.S. News' Best National University Rankings 2022-2023 report.
Results
How Many Advocacy Groups Are Active?
First, we checked which of the top 100 universities h...