From the Fringes to the Mainstream: Rethinking Animal Welfare in Philanthropy

What changes when we stop thinking of animal welfare as a standalone cause?

At the AVPN Global Conference 2026, animal welfare was part of the conversation for the first time through the session, “From the Fringes to Mainstream: Rethinking Animal Welfare.” For a cause that remains significantly underrepresented in philanthropy, its inclusion itself felt important.

But the conversation also raised a more fundamental question: why is animal welfare still considered a fringe issue at all?

Animal welfare sits at the intersection of some of the most pressing challenges philanthropy is already trying to address, including public health, climate change, biodiversity, food security, livelihoods and social justice. And yet, funding for the sector remains disproportionately small.

The discussion brought together Alokparna Sengupta, Managing Director, Humane World for Animals India Foundation; Bruce Friedrich, Founder and President, Good Food Institute; Brinda Upadhyaya, Co-Founder, Upadhyaya Foundation; and Chetan Kharbanda, CEO, Impactful Giving, moderated by Seema Bhatia-Panthaki, Co-Founder and Partner, Jaineev Consulting.

Across their different perspectives, one message emerged clearly: we need to broaden the way we understand animal welfare and, consequently, the way we fund it.

Animals do not need to be useful to us for their suffering to matter

Perhaps the most important place to begin is with the animals themselves.

As Alokparna reminded the room, animals exist for their own reasons, not for ours. Their suffering should matter irrespective of whether addressing it produces a measurable benefit for people, economies or the environment.

Brinda brought this back to a familiar example: a horse used in a wedding procession. Before discussing systems, funding models or interventions, how often do we stop to consider what the animal itself may be experiencing, including its fear, discomfort and pain?

But recognising the intrinsic value of animal lives does not mean animal welfare exists separately from other social and environmental challenges. Looking more closely reveals just how intertwined their lives are with ours.

Animal welfare runs through the systems we are trying to change

Food systems provide perhaps the clearest example.

Bruce pointed to the extraordinary scale of industrial animal agriculture today, with an estimated 210 billion farmed animals within the global food system. Its implications extend beyond animal suffering to climate, biodiversity, antimicrobial resistance, pandemic risk and food security.

These systems have human consequences too. Alokparna highlighted how workers in intensive farming and slaughterhouses often face health and social vulnerabilities. In India, conversations about changing food systems are also inseparable from affordability, caste, class, livelihoods, health and access.

Animal welfare, then, does not sit neatly alongside these issues. It runs through them.

Yet philanthropic funding tells a very different story.

Chetan shared that only around 0.04% of philanthropic funding goes towards farmed animals, with a relatively small group of funders accounting for the majority of that support. Even within animal welfare, farmed animals receive only a small fraction of available funding despite the enormous scale of suffering involved.

He suggested two questions that can help shift the way we approach the issue: What is the scale of suffering? And what are its consequences?

Asking those questions immediately changes the frame and makes animal welfare much harder to dismiss as a niche concern.

Fund the ecosystem, not only the intervention

The question for philanthropy, then, is not simply whether to fund animal welfare. It is how.

Direct funding to organisations remains essential, but philanthropy can also invest in what makes an entire field stronger: research and evidence, organisational capacity, advocacy and communication, collaboration and spaces for shared learning.

At the Upadhyaya Foundation, this has increasingly shaped how we understand our own role. We have learnt that funding is only one of the resources philanthropy can bring to a field.

The India Animal Welfare Forum and India Animal Welfare Funding Circle have grown from this belief in creating stronger connections across the ecosystem, bringing funders, nonprofits and experts together to identify gaps, share knowledge and build collaborations.

Our work on snake conservation has reinforced the same lesson. Complex human-animal coexistence challenges cannot be addressed by one stakeholder alone. Conservationists, rescuers, researchers, veterinarians, communities, governments and funders each hold different pieces of the solution. Philanthropy can help create the conditions for them to work together.

Brinda also reflected on the passion and commitment we see among organisations working directly with animals. When that work is communicated authentically through evidence, stories and direct engagement, that passion can travel. It can help funders understand an issue they may previously have known little about and bring new supporters into the ecosystem.

There are reasons for optimism. Alokparna recalled that when Humane World for Animals began working on battery cages in India around a decade ago, very few organisations were engaged with the issue. Today, more than 15 organisations are working in this space.

Progress is possible when attention, expertise and resources begin to build around an overlooked problem.

Changing funding requires changing mindsets

Ultimately, funding alone will not move animal welfare from the fringes to the mainstream. We also need to change how we think and speak about animals.

Education and awareness can help build compassion early in life. Communication can help people question practices that have become so normalised that we rarely consider the suffering behind them. As Brinda noted, even changing our vocabulary and examining the assumptions about animals embedded within it can make a difference.

The first animal welfare conversation at the AVPN Global Conference was therefore significant beyond the session itself. Bringing animal welfare into mainstream philanthropic spaces is part of changing how the cause is understood.

If philanthropy wants to address climate change, biodiversity loss, public health, resilient food systems and social inequity, animal welfare cannot remain at the fringes of those conversations.

And even without those intersections, there remains a simpler reason to care: the scale of animal suffering warrants our attention in its own right.

Perhaps moving animal welfare into the mainstream begins by recognising both truths at once: animals matter because their lives and suffering matter, and creating a more humane world for them is inseparable from creating healthier, more resilient and more compassionate systems for all of us.