Kalista Barter
You have spared millions of animals from the worst abuses imaginable. Together, we can help millions more.
This year, your donations trained activists around the world to effectively advocate for farmed animals, sent hundreds of thousands of signatures to companies demanding they do better for animals, and secured dozens of life-changing corporate commitments which will rip cages out of factory farms and free millions of hens from intensive confinement for the first time in their lives.
Your donations also fueled first-of-a-kind commitments to improve the lives of animals raised for food, including the very first global cage-free commitment from a worldwide restaurant brand based in Japan—a life changing first step to helping millions of hens, 95% of whom are kept in battery cages for most of their lives. Your support built an even stronger movement through our international Open Wing Alliance and the launch of our national Animal Policy Alliance. And your donations held corporations accountable to their pledges to do better for chickens raised for meat—the most widely abused land animal in the world.
When we talk about the scope of our work, however, we know that it can feel somewhat… disconnected. Imagining millions of individuals is difficult.
But imagine one single hen, and what it must be like for her to stand on solid ground, spread her wings, and walk for the first time. And now, multiply that image by one million to see just how significant what you’re doing really is. This is the story of your impact.
It costs just a few dollars to change a farmed animal’s life. It’s one of the reasons you may support THL, and it’s certainly one of the reasons we do the work we do every day. Our cost-effective approach is one of the reasons we are proud to have been awarded Top Charity status by Animal Charity Evaluators again this year, a distinction we have worked hard to honor since they began evaluating charities ten years ago. We understand what it means to hand over your hard-earned money, and it’s important to us to honor the contributions you make to fuel our work and change as many lives as possible.
To continue to honor your trust in us, every year we take this opportunity to tell you about our plans for the year ahead, so that you can decide whether or not you want to continue in this work with us. We know the year ahead brings many unknowns, but any gift you make, of any amount, will go a long way towards helping animals suffer less.
We still need to raise $4.36 million to fund this year’s budget, and fortunately a group of donors have generously offered to match your donation through the end of the year to help close our funding gap. Because animals need our help every day, please consider joining The Heart Beat, our monthly supporter group, at whatever amount is comfortable for you to sustain this work every month.
In 2023, with your help, we will...
Free as many hens from cages as possible
There are 7,470,000,000 (yes, that’s billion) hens raised for egg production around the world, and over six billion of them live in cages. Over 2,000 commitments to eliminate cages for egg-laying hens have been secured from international companies since we started this work in 2015. In the US, practically all major hotels, food service companies, restaurant chains, manufacturers, and retailers have made commitments to be cage-free by 2026 or earlier. But those commitments mean nothing for animals unless companies actually follow through on getting their egg suppliers to remove cages.
To ensure that arrow continues to go up, we are hyper-focused on corporate accountability—on ensuring that the hundreds of companies that need to be held accountable to their commitments to eliminating intensive confinement over the next three years, actually remove cages once and for all. We are already seeing some major corporations, like Kroger and Walmart, trying to push their respective commitment deadlines to 2030 or 2035, which could mean millions of hens will continue to suffer for several more years. We cannot let that happen.
Additionally, we must continue to secure new corporate cage-free policies to build momentum. We will focus on the largest global companies, both because of the impact on the number of lives changed, and because of their influence on smaller companies in their respective sectors. With our eyes on changing the greatest regional population of caged hens, we will strengthen our work with our local Asian partner organizations in the Open Wing Alliance to gain as many commitments from Asia-based companies as possible following our groundbreaking win with Toridoll this year.
Build an unstoppable global movement for farm animals
When a trillion dollar global industry controls the fate of billions of sentient individuals, animals need every voice, signature, and advocate we can get. That’s why in 2023, we will continue to focus on building a powerful global movement that fights for the better treatment of animals in every single country and region where they suffer. Because animals raised for food don’t care what country they live in, we must do everything we can to stop factory farming everywhere.
We will continue to invest in strategically expanding our evermore powerful Open Wing Alliance (OWA)—which has grown to a coalition of 95 partner organizations in 67 countries—to build strategic alliances with organizations in critical regions. Asia accounts for 71% of all global egg production, so next year, we will focus especially on organizing and supporting partner organizations in Asia to improve the lives of billions of hens. The OWA will support local groups with training, grants, and collaboration to develop momentum that they can then leverage towards winning regional and country-specific corporate cage-free commitments.
Farmed animals are also tragically underrepresented in US public policy conversations. We are trying to change that. Our newly launched Animal Policy Alliance (APA) will organize, unite, and empower local and state-level animal advocacy groups with policy agendas that include animals raised for food. These groups harness and channel the grassroots power of a significant base of animal welfare advocates in the US that they then use to create relationships with legislators at the city, state, and federal level, and advocate for policies that benefit animals.
Advocate for pigs and fishes who suffer in our food system
Every year, trillions of animals are subjected to horrifying cruelty for corporate profit around the world. The vast majority of those animals live underwater. This year we hired our first Aquaculture Animal Welfare Specialist to conduct research that will scope and assess the biggest opportunities to improve aquatic animal welfare, and empower our Campaigns and Corporate Relations teams to take our learnings from improving the lives of the most neglected land animals raised for food, and apply them to improving the lives of the most neglected animals raised for food, period.
Recent successes with major food service providers also gave us a window into the opportunity to make important progress for pigs—intelligent, social, and caring animals whose fate is controlled by the intensely cruel and barbaric pork industry. After initiating negotiations with Sodexo and Compass Group to improve their welfare commitments to chickens raised for meat, we were able to convince them to also improve their timeline to move away from gestation crates—a metal cage that is so tight, mother pigs can’t turn around and often crush their piglets. We will continue to apply this strategy to future campaigns to eliminate all forms of intensive confinement and free every animal raised for food from cages.
Thank you for continuing to fight for animals
The vast majority of Americans support better treatment of animals raised for food. Yet food production giants continue to get away with the widespread abuse of billions of animals on factory farms. Instead of using their money to make the changes necessary to comply with consumer preferences and important laws like Proposition 12, they are fighting to keep business as usual. It is clear that we, as an animal protection movement, are up against a massive industry that is entrenched in their ways and willing to throw significantly more resources than we have at maintaining the status quo. Alongside you, we are fighting to change that.
With the threat to legal protections for animals looming large on the horizon, and with it, the fate of millions of farmed animals, 2023 will be a pivotal year for our work. Our corporate campaigns are evermore important, especially when we can’t rely on laws to protect animals. To continue fueling the life-changing global progress made by The Humane League, The Humane League Japan, The Humane League UK, and The Humane League México, we will need to raise at least $10 million to fund our 2023 budget.
With your partnership, we can disrupt factory farming and transform our broken food system. Step by step. Day by day. Until every animal is free from abuse. Thank you!
