At a Glance
Budget (2025): $1.5 million
Headquarters: Washington, DC
Executive Director: Ben Williamson
Founded: 1995
Background and Agenda
Animal Outlook promotes veganism and animal rights. The organization conducts investigations of food companies and has filed dozens of lawsuits. Animal Outlook encourages “farm transitions” whereby farmers stop raising animals and instead grow plants.
Animal Outlook was founded as “Compassion Over Killing” in 1995 by Paul Shapiro, who later founded a fake meat company. The group previously published a newsletter called The Abolitionist, which in one edition included an announcement to recruit members for a local chapter of the Animal Liberation Front. The ALF is considered a domestic terrorist group by the FBI.
Executive director Ben Williamson is a former PETA employee. “I work every day to promote a peaceful vegan society,” he has written.
Activities
Animal Outlook was an early practitioner of the taking of livestock from farms–what activists call “open rescue,” or what the Washington Post described as “activists are raiding henhouses to steal chickens they say are held inhumanely.”
Animal Outlook has been involved in numerous legal actions against food companies. In one recent case, Animal Outlook sued a grocery chain over signage saying its meat products were “well raised.” Animal Outlook has worked with the group Legal Impact for Chickens on litigation.
Animal Outlook also disseminates a vegan starter kit through which it asks individuals to adopt a vegan diet–indicating there is no production system involving animals that it would consider humane or in which the animals are “well raised.”
Funding
Animal Outlook receives support from Dr. Bronner’s. Other funding sources include:
- About $1 million in 2023 and 2024 from “dark money” donor-advised funds, which act as pass-throughs for anonymous donors.
- Regular six-figure donations from The Greenbaum Foundation, which funds a variety of animal rights/vegan activist organizations.
Three donors account for more than half of Animal Outlook’s contributions in 2024. In 2023, about 70% of its contributions came from four sources.