Issues / Social justice
fairness for everyone
Social justice
Who is heard, who is protected, and who is left out.
Quick answer
Animal welfare connects to fairness between people: who can afford healthy food, whose communities live with pollution, and whose voices shape the law. Public support for protecting animals is broad: 68% of U.S. adults in a 2019 Faunalytics survey supported the goal of minimizing animal cruelty and suffering.
Last reviewed . Sources are listed below.
the basics
What this issue covers
Animal welfare connects to fairness between people too: who can afford healthy food, whose communities live with pollution, and whose voices are heard when laws are made.
At the Humane Choices Foundation (HCF), we explore how questions about animals and questions about justice overlap, and how a more humane food system can also be a fairer one. Here at home, 22.9% of people in Canada's ten provinces, about 8.7 million, lived in food-insecure households in 2023.
Most people already agree on the basics. In one survey, 68% of U.S. adults supported the goal of minimizing animal cruelty and suffering. We want everyone, whatever their background, to have a say in what comes next.
dig in
Questions worth asking
Our guides on each question are being written. Every figure will come with a source.
- Who can afford healthy, humane food, and who cannot?
- Whose communities carry the burden of industrial farming?
- Whose voices are heard when animal and food laws are made?
- What does a fair food system look like?
follow the thread
Where animals come in
The systems that harm animals often weigh most heavily on people with the least power. Slaughterhouse jobs carry high injury rates, families on low incomes face the hardest food choices, and the animals in our care have no voice of their own.
Companion animals
Vet costs and pet-friendly housing are not equally available, which affects who can keep a companion animal.
Service and working animals
Service animals make public spaces more accessible for people with disabilities.
Animals in science
Who decides which animals are used in research, and on whose behalf, is a question of fairness.
by the numbers
What the evidence says
Every figure links to its source. See all of them on our facts and sources page.
68%
Faunalytics, Animal Tracker 2019 2019 survey
40%
Faunalytics, Most Chicken Slaughterhouse Workers At High Risk For Injury Recent study
22.9%
PROOF, University of Toronto, New data on household food insecurity in 2023 2023 data
quick answers
Frequently asked questions
How does animal welfare relate to social justice?
Many of the systems that affect animals also affect people, such as food-system workers and communities near farms. Faunalytics notes that harm often falls on workers with limited options.
Do most people care about animal welfare?
In the 2019 Faunalytics Animal Tracker, 68% of U.S. adults supported the goal of minimizing and eventually eliminating animal cruelty and suffering, and only 16% opposed it.
What does a fair food system look like?
One where everyone can afford healthy food, workers are safe and fairly treated, and animals are treated humanely.
How many Canadians are food insecure?
PROOF, a research program at the University of Toronto, reports that 22.9% of people in the ten provinces, about 8.7 million, lived in food-insecure households in 2023, including about 2.1 million children.
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