Do charities that give animals (Heifer international, World Vision) do more harm than good

In My Humble Opinion
1

It’s Christmas time and we charities around the world ramp up their advertising to hit us during our vulnerable state. My family and friends have routinely given to foundations such as Heifer International and World Vision which gives farm animals to needy nationals. Not many criticisms can be found with a simple google search other than vegan emissaries claiming cruelty to animals.
However one argument is that the animals take valuable and precious resources such as water and grain, not to mention land, and thus their end productions is a negative instead of a positive.
Besides that one argument do you feel these organizations are worth the time and money, or do they possibly create more issues than solve? Have any of you in travels run into these organizations providing the services and creating a better world as they portray in the Christmas brochure that arrived in the mail?

Thanks

2

Well…I have given “animal shares” via Heifer International off and on over the last decade as Christmas gifts. It appears to be a wonderful and well-thought-out idea. I grew up largely as a farm kid, so I’m all for it.

This sounds like an argument from PETA or some other Animal Rights organization, am I right?

This is wandering into IMHO territory, but you must realise that in many parts of the world using the milk, eggs and meat from animals can and often will make the difference between a family surviving, or a family dying of starvation - along with their animals if not tended to. Not every family in the world has the luxury of stopping by their local store for soy milk, Boca burgers, Ramen noodles or McDonalds dollar menu specials.

3

Oop calls for opinions. Moved from General Questions to IMHO.

samclem, Moderator

4

So, from the beginning of time, every herdsman or animal tender has made the wrong choice? Huh, imagine that.

More likely the water, grain, and land, are part of the investment that is measured against the value of the milk/eggs/fleece/offspring, and later the meat/hide/etc. I suspect it is generally a worthwhile return on investment.

5

That depends: Can the humans eat a field full of dried grass? If so, then it’s wasteful to feed a cow with it. But if they can’t, how can they waste it? They weren’t getting any use at all out of before, and now they’re getting milk out of it.

6

Why, yes! A quick Google produced a bunch of PETA hits against Heifer & other organizations enslaving animals for the betterment of mere humans. I didn’t open the links.

Search for yourself if you like. Not giving them the publicity.

Looks as though we’ve got a dishonest OP here. And it’s their very first post!

7

Speaking as a vegetarian, in an “ideal” future world with regards to our treatment of animals, we could all eat happily off of foods that did not involve animals.

Speaking as a realistic human being, that’s not going to happen. Probably ever. And certainly not in marginal areas where a goat or llama or cow can mean life or death for a family, and can help much more than some grain.

The OP is more material for the Pit or Great Debates than IMHO due to its wording, in my opinion.

I don’t proselytize my eating habits. I cook meat for my husband and anyone else who likes. If buying animals for a starving family on the other side of the planet disturbs you so greatly, buy them something else useful - World Vision especially offers dozens of other giving options - or support another charity. Or give them a cow and donate an equal amount of money to a Western charity that supports animal welfare.

8

Dishonest? Nothing I stated was dishonest. I asked questions regarding arguments for and against giving animals as charity. Perhaps you misread or misunderstood my question. I’ll take full blame for that, communicating can be challenging when the typed word is our only medium.

If you are pointing to my notice of “not many arguments can be found other than the vegan emissaries…” then I suggest you open the links you didn’t open. They are all the same argument (I don’t count multiple sites claiming the same argument as multiple arguments… I count them as 1 argument!)

9

This is my field of work. I personally think that organizations that give animals on subsidized credit are generally doing a lot of good.

It’s extremely important not to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and to remember that unlike the people that live and work there (including local staff and the village committees with whom they work to determine what to request), we really don’t have a clue what is going on in the local economy.

I think Heifer has a great message and a great program, personally. Is it my #1 charity of choice? Probably not, but it IS one of my favorite Christmas gifts. With sustainable agriculture (which many organizations also teach), these can provide vital income and nutrition to the poorest of the poor. It also does a great job of connecting the giver/taxpayer with the person who is using the goods and I think that’s an important part of building a global community and making charities accountable.

I work in management and monitoring of aid and nonprofits.

And I agree–it’s kind of a loaded question. To imagine that giving someone a sustainable source of income that can be paid forward, while maintaining the ability to generate a livelihood and contribute to vital nutrition could “do more harm than good” is laughable. There are surely environmental costs but they are nothing compared to the benefit of this family not starving. And in most cases, the animals are not slaughtered until they are already rather old. It’s not economical. And then they are boiled in soups and pilafs for maximum nutrition from the bones, the organs, etc. This is not your McD’s scenario here.

10

I work in development, and am getting an MA in International Development…

Aid effectiveness and transparency is a major topic in this field. There are very smart people who spend their entire lives running rigorous studies trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. A few things make it complicated- it’s a young field and we just haven’t had a lot of time to figure things out, the donor-implementor-beneficiary dynamic is inherently problematic since the people who pay you are not the people you are providing services for, and there is a lot of room for the law of unintended consequences to wreak havoc.

That said, everything more organized than a mom’n’pop charity is going to have a monitoring and evaluation team working with a monitoring and evaluation plan that generally is up to current industry standards. It’s not perfect, but they probably won’t be running out and ruining people’s lives unless something really unexpected happens. For the most part, aid organizations do have a positive impact and do work hard to maximize that positive impact. They aren’t just throwing people a bunch of cows and taking off. That said, you will find infinite debate about any given organization. If you really want to know the exact details of an organization’s philosophy, projects, and how they use money, you’d need to research itself. But I’d say most larger aid organizations do good.

World Vision does a TON of other work besides livestock. I don’t know exactly how they work, but giving individual aid to families in enormously inefficient. I may be wrong, but I imagine most of the donated money goes into community development programs that can help transform the economic situation of the entire community rather than handing out bonuses to individuals. I’m sure their programs are relatively effective. I know people who work there, and they are smart people with specialized education and lots of experience implementing these kinds of programs.

I’m not super-familier with how Heifer Int. implements their projects, but they seem pretty wedded to the “giving individuals livestock” thing. There are some questions in that- it’s certainly a marketable concept to donors…is that why they are sticking to it rather than individually assessing what communities need (which may be wells or schools and not livestock.) If so, does it really matter? After all, a cow and no well is still better than no cow and no well.

Anyway, what you’ve asked is a huge question that people literally get PhD’s in. The short answer, IMHO, is yes, your money probably does good. Yes, there might be someplace out there where it can do any more good. If you care to do the research, you can probably find an organization with a philosophy you explicitly agree with and has published evaluations that impress you. But if you are just wanting to give $20.00 and get the warm fuzzies, I say go ahead and do it the easy way and have fun picturing the fuzzy chicks.

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I think they prefer to be called African…:stuck_out_tongue:

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For something like Heifer International I always wonder where the livestock come from. These charities give the impression that they just pick up some goats and cows at the store and give them away but live creatures don’t work that way. There aren’t thousands of animals sitting in a warehouse somewhere. The reality is that our donations are supporting one or more livestock breeding programs somewhere, otherwise we are just bidding up the price of animals in the needy area, something that looks good on paper but is ultimately damaging to the very place we want to help. Anybody know where the animals come from?

13

I believe Heifer sources animals locally. I seriously doubt that they have the heft to significantly affect livestock price. Livestock markets tend to be pretty lively- even poor countries have some rich people who eat meat every day.

14

Ah, but those fuzzy chicks are bound for lives as enslaved egg producers. Most of them will end their days in stewpots. And many of the young males will face early death–you only need so many cocks. PETA has had Heifer in its crosshairs for years.

If you’d care to do some research, there’s plenty of information on Heifer’s site. I’ll bet they’ve even got some of those multi-degreed folks on the payroll!

Thanks to the OP for prompting me to investigate!

15

When Heifer first started it did in fact have a ranch that it raised animals on and it shipped them to recipient families/villages. This practice is how they got their name. A heifer is a cow who has never been pregnant. Since it’s the cows, and not bulls, that most people want, for milk and calves, they would give young female animals to families/communities (they don’t work with individuals, only groups of families or entire villages at a time). They would raise the heifer on their ranch then just about time she was ready to breed, ship her off to a project. If they sent adult cows they’d need to be milked during the trip, which raises the cost significantly.

The ranch still exists and is now a community development and testing/training facility. They do things like test crop rotation processes, raised bed gardening, water management, irrigation techniques, forest management (they have a pine forest), and a bunch of other programs there. It’s a test bed for appropriate technologies like treadle pumps, biogas, and composting toilets. It’s also a huge training facility for ranch hands, vets, and other livestock/farming professionals. They have live-in students come from all over the country to work there. It’s a working ranch with a couple extra features to improve their community outreach and training potential. They have incorporated a learning center and two global villages with replicas of various types of housing that you’d find in recipient’s countries. They design and test educational and outreach programs to develop teamwork and communication skills. They host school and church groups to teach them about development issues and what life is like in a developing nation.

Anyway, back to the question of sourcing animals. as the program went on they determined they were doing two things, firstly they were spending a bunch of money shipping livestock. That’s very expensive. Secondly the livestock they were shipping had been bred and lived in a different area/climate than the recipient lived in. Disease resistance, drought tolerance, all sorts of characteristics could end up mismatched. Add in the increasing reluctance of governments to allow foreign animals into their country, thank you mad cow disease, and it just became a better choice to source the animals locally.

I’ve spent time at the ranch in two of the last three summers, and am planning to go back this summer as well.

Enjoy,
Steven

On Preview:

PETA has actually prompted Heifer to make some changes. One of the outreach programs, called the Global Gateway challenges youth to an evening preparing meals as a family in a subsistence farming area would. A few years ago they would give each group a rabbit and the group would have to determine if they were willing to have the rabbit butchered so they could have meat with their evening meal. A ranch hand would do the butchering and the children (middle-school aged) would then be given the meat to cook along with some rice and vegetables for their evening meal. The tradeoffs of having a live rabbit in the future versus a meal with meat now were communicated to the kids and they were allowed to debate it and come up with a consensus. For American kids, raised on meat at every meal, the outcome was usually bad for the rabbit. PETA protested, and Heifer has stopped giving kids the option for the time being, but has not ruled out re-instating the program in the future.

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Dishonest??? I fail to see where you came up with that!

The OP mentions giving these in the past, and that s/he is now hearing that some places claim it’s evil. What’s dishonest about that?

In a subsistence-level situation, having an animal that can provide food in a number of ways can be a huge boon. Yeah, the animal requires feed. Would it be better to feed the animal human-edible food such as grain, than to eat the grain yourself? Maybe not, though it obviously changes the nutritional qualities of the grain by running it through the cow or chicken and consuming the results (milk, eggs, beef, chicken) and that may be beneficial.

Plus as others have noted, an animal can turn non-edible stuff (grass) into edible stuff. That’s a net benefit.

Again, you have to weigh using that grassy meadow for cow feed, vs. using it to grow grain.

Anyway, while it may not be as clearcut a picture as one side or the other would like to paint it, helping a family buy a cow (or whatever) might well be a good thing.

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You can also donate seedlings and honeybees through Heifer International. And you can donate camels and water buffalo which are primarily used for their carrying/pulling power if you’re worried about what happens to the males.

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More than that, cattle dung is major source of fertilizer and fuel in some parts of the World. Also in the 3rd world animal food is often the waste products of agriculture. Smaller animals like chickens and pigs are especially useful to the very poor farmers because they can be feed basically garbage and produce useful meat and other products.

19

Alas I may have been too hasty. Just because somebody joined today & for their very first post questioned groups on PETA’s “list”–I let my suspicions run away with me. I’m pretty much in favor of kindness to animals & humane ranching–but I’m not a vegan. Of course, most vegans aren’t as militant as PETA. (PETA says “no” to honey, by the way.)

But things have turned out fine! We’ve learned more about Heifer. Beyond the very simple examination of the group’s website that anybody could have done, Mtgman has supplied some hands’-on information about what seems a pretty reputable group.

20

“giving individual aid to families in enormously inefficient”

I don’t think Heifer does that. They work through existing community development programs to do what is essentially rotating credit. The vast majority of their so-called “overheads” are training and monitoring.

I did look into it because my family asked me to. I’ve also seen them work on the ground. Where they worked, residents did not need agro-credit because they had Heifer: we asked them to choose our scheme or Heifer and they chose Heifer. I think that’s saying something. We weren’t perfect but I did the monitoring and we were certainly having an effect. Generally people went from recipients of charity to givers of charity under our scheme. If they chose Heifer over us, I think that indicates it had at least that impact.

Steven, good for you for volunteering. That sounds awesome!