Take a hen out of a cage she can't turn around in.
Corporate campaigns don't rescue one animal at a time. They change the purchasing policy above millions of them at once.
Choose your ripple
Every.org passes your gift to The Humane League and sends the receipt; it suggests a tip you can set to zero. Or give on thehumaneleague.org with the amount filled in.
Most of the world's egg-laying hens live in battery cages, each with less floor space than a sheet of paper, unable to spread their wings or turn around. Cage-free housing does not make a hen's life good, but it removes the worst of it. Because a handful of large food companies buy most of the eggs, a change in their purchasing policy changes the lives of millions of birds at once.
- Animal welfareOur World in DataHow many animals are farmed, how they are housed, and how that is changing.
- Open Wing AllianceThe Humane LeagueThe coalition running cage-free campaigns worldwide, with progress by company.
- Welfare Footprint ProjectWelfare FootprintResearch quantifying how much suffering a caged hen experiences compared with a cage-free one.
Hens per dollar is ACE's central estimate. Its published range runs from a fifth of this figure to four times it.
The figures
What The Humane League does
The Humane League runs corporate campaigns: public pressure on food companies to adopt cage-free egg policies, then years of follow-up work making sure the commitments are actually implemented on the promised date.
How Animal Charity Evaluators gets there
ACE reviews THL on programmatic effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and organizational health, and has recommended it for eleven years running. The hens-per-dollar figure is ACE's own cost-effectiveness analysis of THL's cage-free accountability program: commitments won, hens covered, expected implementation rates, and the share of each win attributable to THL rather than the wider movement.
What could be wrong
- ACE's central figure sits inside a wide range: its suffering-adjusted estimate runs from a fifth of the headline number to four times it. The figure is independent now; it is not precise. Attribution in a coalition campaign is hard, since many groups push the same company.
- Giving What We Can, which vets evaluators, currently relies on ACE's Movement Grants program and on EA Funds' Animal Welfare Fund, but not on ACE's charity evaluations, after reviewing them in 2023 and 2024. It still expects ACE-recommended charities to beat unevaluated ones; it is not yet confident enough in the evaluations to build its own recommendations on them.
- A corporate commitment is a promise about the future. Some are implemented late, and some are quietly walked back, which is why the follow-up enforcement work matters as much as the campaign.
- Cage-free is a large improvement in one dimension of a hen's life, not a good life. This is harm reduction at scale, and worth saying plainly.
- Comparing animal welfare to human health means putting a value on animal suffering. There is no objective exchange rate, and we won't pretend there is one.
Every figure is an average program cost, not a receipt. How we phrase things.