Roughly 99% of the animals people affect are farmed, and the vast majority of those are chickens and fish. Shelters and wildlife rescues get most of the donations. That mismatch is the single most important fact in animal giving, and it is why the evaluators’ lists look nothing like a typical donor’s.
The 2025 list, still current
Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) publishes recommendations each November. Its current ten, named in November 2025, are:
| Charity | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| The Humane League | US, UK, Mexico, Japan | Corporate campaigns for cage-free eggs and better chicken welfare |
| Sinergia Animal | Latin America, Southeast Asia | Corporate cage-free and institutional plant-based commitments |
| Shrimp Welfare Project | India, Vietnam, Ecuador | Electrical stunning before slaughter for farmed shrimp |
| Wild Animal Initiative | Global | Research on the welfare of wild animals |
| Aquatic Life Institute | Global | Fish and shrimp welfare standards in certifications and policy |
| Dansk Vegetarisk Forening | Denmark | Plant-based food policy and institutional catering |
| Sociedade Vegetariana Brasileira | Brazil | Plant-based meals in public institutions |
| Good Food Fund | China | Plant-forward diets in food service and policy |
| Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği | Turkey | Farmed animal welfare campaigns |
| Animal Welfare Observatory | Spain | Corporate welfare campaigns and policy |
Four of these (Aquatic Life Institute, Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği, Dansk Vegetarisk Forening and Sinergia Animal) are being re-evaluated in 2026 before their two-year status expires. New recommendations come in November 2026.
What the money bought
ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund pools donations and splits them across the list. Its August 2026 round granted $1,365,823, following $1,897,538 in February 2026. The largest August grants went to Wild Animal Initiative ($339,295), The Humane League ($314,162) and Sinergia Animal ($289,029).
Some of the outcomes ACE reports:
- Shrimp Welfare Project: once all the stunners it has placed with producers are running, about 6.1 billion shrimp a year will be stunned before slaughter rather than killed by asphyxiation or ice slurry.
- The Humane League: corporate commitments it won are sparing about 5 million hens from cages annually, plus thousands of mother pigs from crates.
- Sinergia Animal: institutional food commitments projected to produce about 1.8 million plant-based meals a year.
Why corporate campaigns dominate
A cage-free pledge from one large retailer changes conditions for millions of hens at almost no cost to the charity beyond staff time and pressure campaigns. Independent estimates from Rethink Priorities and others have put the cost of corporate chicken campaigns at pennies per hen-year improved. That is orders of magnitude cheaper per animal than running a shelter, which is why every evaluator’s list is heavy on campaign groups rather than direct care.
The shrimp work is the newer frontier. Shrimp are farmed in numbers that dwarf every land animal combined, and a stunner is a one-time purchase that keeps working. The uncertainty is whether shrimp feel pain in a morally relevant way; the evaluators think the probability is high enough, and the cost per animal low enough, that it is worth funding.
What is missing from the list
- Shelters and rescues. Not because they do bad work, but because cost per animal helped is thousands of times higher than a corporate campaign.
- US-only groups. Most of the list works outside the US, where welfare standards are lower and campaigns are cheaper.
- Any cost-per-animal number you can fully trust. Corporate pledges take years to implement and some are quietly missed. ACE and Rethink Priorities discount for that, but the discount is a judgment call.
Bottom line
If your goal is to reduce animal suffering per dollar, the evidence points at farmed animals, at campaigns rather than direct care, and mostly at work outside the US. ACE’s fund is the simplest way to back the whole list; The Humane League and Shrimp Welfare Project are the two with the clearest per-animal numbers.
Method notes
Grant amounts and impact figures are from ACE’s August 2026 update. The “99% farmed” figure is a widely cited order-of-magnitude estimate based on animal-agriculture headcounts, not a precise statistic.
Sources
Figures come from the cited sources as of the dates shown. Cost-effectiveness estimates change as programs and evidence change; check the source before giving. We are not financial advisers and receive nothing from any charity named here.