If you care about animals and want to reduce their suffering, but aren’t sure exactly how, Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is an organization that might be able to help.

The California-based nonprofit puts out an annual guide for recommended animal charities, and it recently released its list for this year. (Disclosure: ACE has helped fund some of Future Perfect’s work since 2020.)

Most of the top charities focus on improving conditions on factory farms, which makes sense, given that they’re sites of suffering on a massive scale. It’s not just the death that takes place there — in the US, factory farming kills more than 10 billion land animals each year — but the suffering that animals are forced to endure while they’re alive. Hens, calves, and pigs are often confined in spaces so small they can barely move, and conditions are so galling that “ag-gag” laws exist to hide the cruelty from the public.

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When we hear about some of these conditions — like the fact that chickens are forced to produce eggs at such a fast rate that their intestines sometimes partially fall out under the strain — we may want to put a stop to them. But it can be hard to know which charities will actually make good use of our dollars.

ACE researches and promotes the most high-impact, effective ways to help animals. The group uses three main criteria when deciding whether to recommend an organization:

• Charities must be “likely to significantly and cost-effectively reduce the suffering of many animals” — that is, they’re doing high-impact work and they’ve got the evidence to back it up.
• Charities must have “room for more funding” — meaning that if they get an influx of new funding as a result of being recommended as a top charity, they have the capacity to put it to good use.
• Charities must have strong “organizational health,” meaning the group is run well and has a positive, stable culture.

With this in mind, ACE has selected its recommended charities for 2025:

1. Sinergia Animal: Industrialized meat production is growing rapidly across Latin America and Asia, and Sinergia Animal — which was founded only seven years ago in 2018 — has quickly become a leader in fighting back against it. The group has investigated conditions at numerous........

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