Pledge kindness to all animals
Four simple actions to help animals everywhere
Take the pledge today
Thank you for your pledge!
Together, we can protect all animals. To begin, take your action for farmed animals by donating to FarmKind's six recommended charities working to fix factory farming.
Donate to Help Farmed Animals
Why take the pledge?
We all love animals
Most of us have experienced the special bond with a pet β a dog who greets us with joy, a cat who comforts us on difficult days. These relationships show how deeply we care about animals and how instinctively we want to protect them from suffering
All animals deserve kindness, not just pets
Science reveals that a wide range of animals have rich inner lives, capable of pleasure and pain, and forming strong bonds with humans and each other. They donβt deserve to suffer simply because they aren't our pets, live on farms, or are less conventionally βcuteβ.
Most animals receive no help
While companion animals benefit from our care, billions of farm animals live in cruel factory farms, millions of lab animals endure painful unnecessary tests, and wild animals suffer habitat destruction and cruel pest control. For every pet in a loving home, thousands of other animals suffer unseen.
Make a real difference, easily
This pledge offers four straightforward actions that allow ordinary people to have an extraordinary impact. You can help all four groups of animals without dramatically changing your life or becoming an activist.
How it works
Take the pledge: Commit to four simple actions to help all types of animals
Pay it forward: Nominate three friends to take the pledge on social media (see how below)
Make a lasting difference: Take your pledge actions to start helping animals everywhere
How to nominate your friends
Join the challenge
Spoil your pet with something over-the-top while pledging kindness to ALL animals.
βοΈ Watch our example to see how it's done!
Create your #PledgeKindness video
1 Use Our Audio
Use the audio from our post explaining the pledge:
2 Go Over-the-Top for Your Pet
Get creative with it! Here are some ideas to get you started:
Let doggy get dirty
Cat spa day
Build a bunny castle
Hamster spaghetti dinner
Or simply show your pet enjoying their favorite treat or activity!
3 Show Your Pledge Number (optional)
Search for #pledgekindness in Insta/TikTokβs sticker library and add your pledge number (sent to you by email)
4 Tag Friends and Share
Tag at least 3 friends to challenge them to take the pledge next, then post on social media π
Feeling lazy?
If you don't want to make a video, you can post a photo instead, showing off your pledge number with our GIF and tagging 3 friends. Or if that's too much, copy the template description and make a text-only post! There's something for every motivation level π
Why these actions?
In a world with countless demands on our time and attention, we've carefully selected actions that deliver the maximum impact for animals while requiring minimal disruption to your life. These aren't just random good deeds β they're strategic choices backed by research that offer the best "return on effort" for helping animals.
Finding the sweet spot
We analyzed dozens of potential actions for each animal category using a simple framework: maximizing impact while minimizing the effort required. The actions in this pledge fall in the "high impact, low effort" quadrant β giving you the most bang for your buck when it comes to helping animals.
Adopting from shelters or rescues rather than purchasing from breeders helps save one of the 6.3 million companion animals entering U.S. shelters each year. Your choice directly reduces demand for breeding operations that often prioritize profit over animal welfare, leading to overcrowding, inbreeding, and inadequate care.
While adoption may not be possible in every situation, and sometimes requires additional searching for specific traits or needs, prioritizing this option whenever feasible makes a meaningful difference: You give a deserving animal a second chance at life while freeing up shelter space for another animal in need, all while typically spending less money than purchasing from a breeder.
Check your local shelter or websites like Petfinder.com for your perfect companion.
Regular donations to expert-recommended charities help improve the lives of billions of animals suffering in factory farms. These organizations eliminate the cruelest practices through corporate campaigns, policy reform, and innovation.
For example, The Humane League has helped increase cage-free egg production in the US from just 5% to 40%, freeing millions of hens from battery cages where they couldn't even spread their wings.
For impact-to-effort ratio, nothing beats donation: just $23 monthly can do as much good as going fully vegan, making it accessible for anyone who finds dietary change challenging.
Browse FarmKind's recommended charities to find one that speaks to you, or invest in a balanced portfolio through their Impact Fund.
Choosing cruelty-free personal care products certified by independent organizations helps reduce demand for animal testing that subjects millions of rabbits, monkeys, guinea pigs, mice, and rats to painful experiments without painkillers. These tests often involve forced chemical exposure, eye and skin irritation tests, and lethal dose studies.
The effort for consumers to avoid this is minimalβsimply checking for certification logos like Leaping Bunny or consulting PETA's database when shopping. Most everyday items have cruelty-free alternatives at competitive prices, making this an easy one-off habit change with significant long-term impact.
You might be surprised to learn that common pest control methods cause avoidable suffering at a massive scale. Millions of wild animals are killed through pest management schemes each year, even though humane alternatives exist. Traditional methods like glue traps cause extreme suffering, with animals dying slowly from exhaustion, dehydration, or self-inflicted injuries. Using humane pest control methods prevents unnecessary suffering for wild animals that occasionally share our living spaces.
Poisons can create a deadly chain reaction: affected rodents become easy prey for predators, causing secondary poisoning that kills owls, hawks, foxes, and even pets. Humane alternatives include trap and release, ultrasonic deterrents, contraceptive baits or prevention by sealing entry points.
For unavoidable situations requiring lethal control, quick-kill snap traps cause significantly less suffering than poison or glue traps. While these humane options may require slightly more effort and cost slightly more, this small effort dramatically reduces suffering and can be more effective long-term.
This simple household choice creates impact for wild animals without requiring you to uproot your life to join anti-deforestation or whaling blockades.
Why these groups of animals?
We chose the four groups of animals that humans impact most and have individual influence over:
| Number impacted | How we impact them collectively | How we can influence them individually |
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Companion animals
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Farmed animals
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Lab animals
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Wild animals
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- Selective breeding leads to chronic health issues for certain breeds
- Commercial breeding operations and puppy mills create systemic welfare problems
- Widespread abandonment and neglect result in millions of animals in shelters annually
- High degree of direct control over personal pets' quality of life, with responsible pet sourcing being one of the most influential single decisions
- Limited indirect influence over other companion animals through donations, volunteering, and voting for animal protection laws
- hundreds of billions of invertebrates (e.g. 1.6B shrimp and >135B bees)
- trillions of invertebrates (e.g. 440B shrimp and >5T bees)
- Factory farming condemns billions of animals to inhumane conditions where they can't express their natural behaviours (e.g. laying hens can't spread their wings, mother dairy cows can't care for their young)
- Industry prioritizes production efficiency over welfare, resulting in chronic disease, stress and fear, overcrowding in filthy conditions, surgical procedures without pain-relief and inhumane slaughter
- Personal diet and clothing purchase decisions can impact hundreds of farmed animals each year
- Opportunity to indirectly influence other animals through voting (especially in ballot initiatives like California's Prop 12)
- We have a particularly significant opportunity to help thousands of animals through donations, because there are highly efficient charities that can help several animals per dollar
- Animals are used for experiments and to test products for human comfort and safety
- Many cases of abuse have been documented, driven by lack of oversight and transparency
- Industry reliance on animal models continues despite development of alternatives
- Consumer choices for "cruelty-free" products affect testing demand
- Otherwise, limited direct influence compared to farmed or companion animals: Look for opportunities to support bans on testing and the development of better alternatives
- Habitat destruction through urbanization, agriculture, and deforestation displaces billions of wild animals annually
- Pollution (plastics, chemicals, pesticides) causes suffering via entanglement, ingestion, poisoning, and reproductive harm
- Lethal pest control methods kill hundreds of millions through painful traps, poisons, and inhumane extermination
- Dietary choices impact land use and habitat destruction, with animal agriculture being a leading cause of deforestation
- Consumer decisions around plastic use and proper waste disposal directly affect wildlife entanglement and ingestion risks
- Personal pest control methods represent one of our most direct impacts on wild animals, with humane alternatives available for most scenarios
Who is FarmKind?
We connect kind people with impactful charities that are fixing factory farming
Guide
We do the homework for you, so that you can donate to the best charities working to end factory farming without the hassle of spending hours doing research.
Holistic
Together, our charities help all the main types of animals impacted by our food system address the harms of factory farming to animals, people and the planet.
Fully independent
We operate independently, funded by philanthropic grants. This ensures that 100% of your donation goes to your chosen charities and that our recommendations stay bias-free.
Why did FarmKind launch the pledge?
Instead of asking the world of people, we wanted to give people a way to help all 4 of companion animals, farmed animals, lab animals and wildlife that is both impactful and accessible. We thought this would not only help a lot of animals, but also help people take another step on the incredibly rewarding journey of taking personal action to build a better world.
At FarmKind, we love animals. We know that billions of people love animals too, and want to help them. But often, people feel overwhelmed by the scale of animal suffering and environmental destruction, which can be so demotivating that most people end up just caring for the animals right in front of them: Their pets.