Impact

We Animals visuals have been used regularly by Australian NGOs for their ongoing live export campaigns. In May 2024, these efforts led to Australia’s announcement of a ban on live sheep exports due to animal welfare concerns. On July 1, this historic legislation was officially passed by Parliament and will take effect from May 1, 2028.

We Animals collaborated with the Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) in 2018 to document caged laying duck farms in Taiwan. In 2019, EAST revealed the findings from this investigation in a campaign calling on the Council of Agriculture to draft guidelines for the humane farming of ducks. The campaign, which featured our visuals extensively, attracted widespread media coverage and kickstarted negotiations with the government. On December 30, 2021, after sustained pressure on elected officials, Taiwan issued a ban on new battery cage farms for egg-laying ducks. This is believed to be the first ban on cages for laying ducks at a national level.

Canadian animal law non-profit Animal Justice has used our visuals extensively throughout their initiatives. Of note most recently was their use of our mink farming images to promote a ban on fur farms across Canada. In November 2021, British Columbia announced it was banning mink farms in the province due to public health risks related to COVID-19 outbreaks—thanks to the work of many organizations. The lawyers at Animal Justice will continue working hard to outlaw fur farms on the national level.

In October 2021, World Animal Protection used one of our visuals in a poster campaign across Seattle to put pressure on the travel company Expedia Group to stop selling tickets to captive dolphin shows. Over 100 posters were displayed in 25 locations around the city. Just three weeks after launching the posters in Seattle, Expedia Group announced its new animal welfare policy dropping captive dolphin shows. World Animal Protection reports that it was a combination of campaign tactics that influenced this change and that this powerful image of a lone dolphin in captivity on the campaign poster helped to increase pressure on the company.

In early 2019, We Animals collaborated with the Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) to document conditions on Taiwanese dairy farms. EAST used visuals from this investigation extensively throughout their campaign, which called on the Council of Agriculture to address serious animal welfare concerns within the country’s dairy industry. In 2021, the campaign was successful in prompting Taiwan’s government to develop and release formal guidelines for the welfare of dairy cows.

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In 2020, our team was able to distribute hundreds of wet market images and clips to organizations educating audiences on the links between animal agriculture and zoological diseases during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, including the UN Environment Programme’s short video on the Coronavirus.

We Animals collaborated with the Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) in 2018 to document the practice of fish binding. EAST’s campaign reached more than one million people, and initiated meetings at multiple levels of government to address the issue of aquatic animal welfare. As a result, the Marine Bureau of the Kaohsiung City Government is issuing guidance to encourage vendors to end the practice.

In collaboration with local advocacy groups, We Animals published a story in The Guardian about the slaughter of pigs in Thailand and Cambodia that has reached and engaged with audiences worldwide. In direct response to this story, Thailand’s Department of Livestock Development has stated that it is taking action to apply stricter enforcement in slaughterhouses countrywide, a new organization, CATALYST, was born to work on slaughter issues in Thailand, and The Thai Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals informed advocates on the ground that at least three illegal slaughterhouses have been shut down since the release of the story.

In 2017 We Animals images helped lead to the Montreal SPCA’s criminal charges against a fur farmer in Quebec, Canada, for three counts of animal cruelty and neglect. This was the first known animal abuse conviction for fur farming in Canada.

In 2014 We Animals partnered with the documentary film Maximum Tolerated Dose and Cruelty Free International (then ‘BUAV’) to cover monkey breeding facilities in South East Asia. Our work was used by BUAV with the Species Survival Network at the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species in Geneva, Switzerland, resulting in the suspension of trade of long-tailed macaques in Laos. To this day, there continues to be no official trade in long-tailed macaques out of Laos.