Humane League Labs is a unit of The Humane League, an international non-profit dedicated to farm animal advocacy. Our mission is to inform advocacy strategies through actionable research on their effectiveness. Since its creation in 2013, Humane League Labs has pioneered research on various forms of activism related to the mission of The Humane League. We have conducted exploratory studies on the relative effectiveness of videos depicting cruelty on factory farms, leaflets used for outreach at campuses, photographs accompanying our literature and the messaging we use in our online and printed materials.
The Humane League, since its inception in 2005, has held a steadfast commitment to a continual revision of its campaign strategies and priorities, informed by a deep interest in our effectiveness on behalf of animals and the value we see in evidence-driven advocacy. Humane League Labs, in reflection of this tradition, in June of 2016, announced a statement of commitment to certain priorities and principles which will guide our research. These cover our policies on project prioritization, metrics, transparency, statistical methods and continual assessment.
In the coming months and years, Humane League Labs will embark on a research agenda covering some of the testable interventions used in the farm animal advocacy movement. We will produce four categories of appropriately labeled research output:
- Blog posts which introduce, clarify, explain or announce matters of relevance to the mission of Humane League Labs.
- Exploratory research reports aimed at developing new hypotheses, measurement tools, experiment design insights and evidence to justify deeper examination of specific items of interest.
- Confirmatory research reports which are more rigorous, adequately powered, pre-registered studies with pre-declared hypotheses and pre-declared methodologies for testing them.
- Advocacy recommendations, our reports with highest quality evidence available, based on overwhelming evidence discovered in a confirmatory study or accumulated evidence from multiple studies or meta-analyses of studies.
Whether you are a researcher, a veg-oriented business, an activist, a donor or just an interested party curious about what works in farm animal advocacy, we invite you to watch these pages, offer feedback, participate in our research and join us in strengthening our work on behalf of farm animals.