On World Animal Day, Dog Desk Animal Action did something different. We spent the day using our platform to introduce our audience to animal welfare organisations and rescuers working around the world. We called it Charity Takeover Day and the message running through everything we did was It Takes A Movement, Not A Brand.
The idea came from a concern I have had for some time about animal welfare becoming increasingly dominated by huge platforms and personalities while thousands of people doing the work remain largely invisible. Rather than simply talking about it, we decided to try something. For one day, we deliberately moved ourselves out of the centre and used the audience we had built to show people the wider movement instead.
People responded. They shared organisations they may never have encountered before and helped their work travel beyond our audience. Giving attention to other organisations didn’t diminish our own platform either. That was encouraging because social media constantly encourages organisations to compete for attention, as though somebody else being seen somehow means there is less space for you. What we saw suggested something very different. We could use our platform to amplify other people without losing our own audience in the process.
It was when we looked more closely at what had happened across the day that things became much more interesting. Even though we had deliberately presented animal welfare as a movement, attention still had a tendency to concentrate around people and around situations where the story was immediately understandable. That made me reconsider something I have been thinking about for a long time.
I have been very critical of the way large animal welfare brands can create personalities around rescue, but perhaps that is only part of what is happening. Perhaps audiences are looking for those personalities too. A movement is complicated. It consists of thousands of people, organisations, communities and different kinds of work. There is no single protagonist and no simple story to follow. Give us an individual standing beside an animal and everything becomes much easier to understand. Here is the animal, here is the rescuer and here is the person we can follow.
There is nothing wrong with recognising somebody doing extraordinary work, but there is a considerable difference between recognising somebody and allowing that person to become representative of an entire movement. We regularly hear that countries need their own version of whichever rescuer currently has a huge international profile, but those people already exist in every country. There are thousands of them doing the work every day. Most simply don’t have millions of people watching them.
The same pattern seems to appear around crisis. Animal welfare audiences can respond extraordinarily well when something is urgently wrong. We see an animal suffering or somebody desperately needing help and we mobilise. That response can save lives and should never be dismissed, but eventually another emergency arrives, then another, and our attention moves with them. The people responsible for yesterday’s animals don’t move. Neither do the animals themselves.
Countries can experience the same thing. One country suddenly becomes the focus of international animal welfare attention and for a while everybody is talking about it. Eventually another crisis somewhere else begins to dominate our feeds. The original problem has not necessarily been resolved; we have simply stopped looking at it. That was one of the strongest thoughts I took away from World Animal Day. Attention is mobile, but responsibility isn’t.
There was another part of the exercise that concerned me much more, because the type of content capable of attracting our attention most easily is often the content created by suffering. That took me back to conversations Dog Desk Animal Action has had with brands interested in animal welfare content, and suddenly those conversations looked rather different when placed alongside what we had observed during Charity Takeover Day.
When these brands talk to organisations like ours, one of the things they can offer is reach, sometimes an audience measured in millions. For a small animal welfare organisation, the possibility of putting its work in front of millions of people sounds enormously attractive. But in conversations we have experienced, there has been a very obvious problem. They aren’t interested in the happy, healthy dogs. They are interested in the suffering ones because the suffering makes good content.
That is much more difficult to dismiss as simply the strange behaviour of a social media algorithm. The suffering dog has something the healthy dog doesn’t have: an instantly compelling story. There is the injury, the fear or the terrible condition in which the animal is found, followed by the rescue, the veterinary treatment, the recovery and hopefully the transformation. It contains everything needed to hold an audience.
The healthy dog doesn’t offer the same thing. Neither does the dog quietly living safely in a sanctuary, the routine vaccination, the uneventful sterilisation or the animal who never needed rescuing because effective welfare work prevented the emergency from happening in the first place. Yet the healthy dog is precisely what all of this is supposed to be about.
When enormous reach is part of the proposition but the suffering animals are what is wanted to feed that reach, we are no longer talking only about what people happen to enjoy watching. We are talking about value. Suffering produces compelling content, compelling content attracts attention, attention builds audiences and large audiences have financial value. That is how animal suffering can begin to function as content currency.
None of this requires anybody to cause suffering. There is already far too much of it. Nor does it mean that showing rescue work is inherently exploitative. We show our own rescue work because people deserve to understand what is happening to animals and what their support achieves. The concern is what happens when an economic relationship begins to develop around the suffering itself.
Large platforms need a continuing supply of content. Small rescue organisations are surrounded by the stories capable of providing it because they are surrounded by animals in need, and many of those organisations desperately need money and exposure. One side has the audience and the other has the suffering, with the promise of reach connecting the two. That creates a significant power imbalance and raises questions about whether financially vulnerable rescues can gradually become content pipelines for much larger brands.
The people providing those stories aren’t simply content creators. They are the people doing the rescue, paying the veterinary bills, providing food, managing rehabilitation and remaining responsible for those animals when the audience has moved on. If the suffering creates attention and that attention creates value elsewhere, we should be asking much harder questions about who is carrying the responsibility and who is benefiting from the story.
There is also a fundamental contradiction at the centre of this. Animal welfare is supposed to be trying to reduce suffering, yet suffering can produce extraordinarily successful animal welfare content while prevention often produces almost nothing to show.
A dog hit by a car can generate an entire rescue story. The dog who was never on that road because effective population management reduced the number of dogs living on the street has no story. A litter of desperately sick puppies can generate weeks of powerful content. A successful sterilisation programme that means those puppies were never born into suffering produces no dramatic rescue because there was never an emergency in the first place.
When prevention works, very often nothing happens. That is the success, but nothing happening is extraordinarily difficult to turn into compelling content for an audience of millions.
This is where everything we observed on World Animal Day started to connect. We saw how easily attention can concentrate around individuals, how strongly people can respond to immediate need and how quickly complicated animal welfare issues have to compete for attention with stories that can be understood in seconds. Put that alongside conversations in which huge reach is offered while the interest is specifically in suffering animals and it becomes difficult not to question whether the way we consume animal welfare is beginning to influence the way animal welfare itself operates.
If attention disproportionately follows suffering, money can follow that attention. If attention concentrates around individuals, influence and resources can begin concentrating around individuals. If attention repeatedly moves towards the latest emergency, organisations can find themselves receiving the greatest response precisely when they are in crisis. None of this requires bad people or deliberate manipulation. Incentives can change behaviour without anybody consciously deciding to create the system that results.
That is why I don’t think responsibility sits only with large brands, platforms or rescue organisations. Those of us consuming animal welfare content are part of the same system. We decide what makes us stop scrolling, what we share, who we follow and where we send our money. Collectively, those decisions send powerful signals about the animal welfare we value enough to pay attention to.
The concern isn’t that watching a rescue video somehow causes another animal to suffer. It is that an entire ecosystem can develop in which responding to visible suffering attracts far more attention and resources than preventing that suffering from happening. If that imbalance becomes large enough, the way we consume animal welfare content could inadvertently help prolong the conditions we all say we want to end.
We started Charity Takeover Day wanting to demonstrate that animal welfare is bigger than any organisation, personality or platform. We finished it asking a much more uncomfortable question about the movement itself. If our ultimate goal is fewer animals suffering, then we need to become as interested in the work that prevents suffering as we are in the stories of animals being rescued from it.
It Takes A Movement, Not A Brand still stands. But World Animal Day made me realise there is another part to it. If we want a movement capable of creating lasting change, we also need to think much harder about where we give our attention, because what we choose to watch, share and support may ultimately influence what kind of animal welfare survives.