Investing for Animal Welfare
By Jia Yu ‘23
Among the multitudinous social causes for which ESG investing advances is missing the voice of those who truly cannot be their own self-advocates. I am referring to animals, those creatures with which we supposedly share this plant but too often exploit for our needs.
Having grown up in a large city, my interactions with animals, or even nature in general, had been limited - well, discouraged recalling the “Don’t feed the ducks” sign at our local pond. For me, they were mere adornments for the scenery, or at best, a form of detached coexistence. However, my nonchalance towards animals began to evolve after I adopted a pair of parakeets during the 2020 quarantine. Over time, it seeped into my conscience that parakeets, and many other organisms for that matter, share the fundamental needs as we humans in order to survive. As if this is a remarkable revelation, you may interject, for who does not know that animals must eat, interact, and sleep. Indeed. But we should also interpret these habitual activities, mundane and unremarkable as they appear, like ones that both animals and humans alike pursue only through their own faculty and willpower. Hence, even if we succumb to the idea that animals have an inferior level of existence, we should at the very least in our engagements accord them a higher purpose beyond that of our exploitative needs. As a pet owner, foremost I see my parakeets as a source of enjoyment which in itself is an exploitative need. Yet, as a pet owner, I strive to accord them a higher life purpose by providing the necessary comforts such that they can realize a certain purpose in their life - playing with toys, singing to each other - than merely serving as an object of my enjoyment.
Through this philosophical framework, I hope to mount a logical cause for why animal welfare is a sensical factor to consider in ESG investing. On one hand, it is promising that in recent years we have seen several nonprofits at the forefront of informing investors about cruelty-free investing. People for the Ethical Treatments of Animals (PETA) provides guidelines individual investors can use to vet potential investment targets. These steps range from inspecting whether a company performs animal-testing or vivisection to more broad-based assessments of whether the company “use animals in the process of creating food, clothing, or entertainment; destroy the environment; otherwise, contribute to the exploitation and suffering of animals.”
Additionally, at least one organization, the Cruelty-Free Investing (CFI), advocates a more straightforward screening methodology. On their homepage, they have sorted every stock listed on the three major exchanges - NASDAQ, NYSE, & AMEX - into two categories: companies that exploit and companies that do not exploit animals, numbering 1308 and 3750 respectively. CFI defines companies on the “exploit” list as having used animals in certain ways such as engaging in animal testing, selling clothing or food with animal products, or breeding animals for the previous two purposes. Such a dualistic approach has its appeal - precisely assuring investors that picking from the “do not exploit” list will satisfy all cruelty-free investing criteria, and free them from conducting individual research.
At the same time, not all inclined towards cruelty-free investing may be ready or willing to accept such restrictive criteria. For example, one may contest that using animals as meat products is not cruelty also as long as they were raised in decent conditions and induced minimal pain during slaughter. While this investor would have deviated from CFI’s strict definition of cruelty-free, they would align with my more flexible view that under certain needs, for example, nourishment, we are allowed to use animals provided that we accord value to their existence by providing good living conditions and minimal suffering. Of course, these are only my personal thoughts. Yet, I genuinely believe and encourage that anyone at least slightly well-intentioned towards animal welfare should feel encouraged to pursue their own criteria to cruelty-free investing. Additionally, even for companies that are not 100% cruelty-free, investors may still choose to invest whenever they enact a positive change in the way they treat animals, such as to offer them a signal that they are heading in the right direction.