Which Groups Are Least Likely To Support Animal Causes (And Which Causes Do They Support Instead)?

Which Groups Are Less Likely To Donate To Animal Causes?

I looked at data on charitable giving from around 3,800 U.S. residents who had donated to charity in the last twelve months, in order to better understand how people that give to animal charities differ from those who do not. I first looked at which demographics were least likely to direct their giving towards animals.

At a glance, there are several patterns. Some of these are fairly clear, but others are less so, such as the effect of income, if there is one at all. Care must be taken when drawing conclusions – perhaps, for instance, a particular group might simply be less likely to donate to any given cause area, and tend to donate to fewer causes overall? Alternatively, given that demographics are themselves often correlated, such as age and income, could some trends be explained entirely by others?

In order to tackle these questions, I conducted a statistical analysis to see which aspects of a person’s demographics, taken together, best predicted whether or not they would give to animal charities. In doing so, I looked only at people who did donate to charity, and controlled for the total number of causes they donated to, to remove any effects which could be fully explained by a certain group donating to more or fewer causes in total.

I found the following: being White and female each made you considerably more likely to donate to animal causes. Income, on the other hand, did not. The influence of age was mixed – being 18-24 made you more likely to give to animal causes, and being 65 or older made you less likely to do so, but being 25-34 also decreased your likelihood of giving to animals. Finally, which region you live in, and whether you are Hispanic, don’t appear to make much difference to whether you donate to animal causes.

The following groups of donors were the least likely to give to animal charities, beginning with the most underrepresented groups:

• Black people
• People aged 65+
• Asians
• 25-34 year olds
• Men

What Causes Do These Groups Support Instead?

For each of the underrepresented groups identified above, as well as for people who don’t donate to animal charities as a whole, I looked at how being a member of that group, all else equal, affected what causes someone gave to.

I identified which causes a particular group is disproportionately likely or unlikely to give to–that is, the causes where being a member of that group most affects your odds of donating. I then include charts below showing how the donation rate to each of those causes would differ between the group of interest and the comparison group if these two groups were like the sample at large in all other respects. The comparison group is the group (with respect to the demographic in question) that is most overrepresented among animal donors.

For context, here are the seven most popular causes in the sample at large:

People Who Don’t Donate To Animal Causes As A Whole

Which causes are more popular among animal donors than among people of a similar demographic who donated, but not to animals? To answer this, I conducted another statistical analysis to see what giving to animal charities predicted about someone’s other donations, while controlling for demography and total number of causes donated to.

I found a number of significant trends. In order of association size, the causes disproportionately associated with giving to animals were:

• Environmental charities (excluding animal-specific ones)
• Charities supporting troops or veterans
• Disaster relief

The ones disproportionately linked to not giving to animal causes were:

• Places of worship
• Educational institutions and charities

The Underrepresented Groups

Men

Relative to women, with strongest trends first, men were disproportionately most likely to donate to:

• Environmental charities
• Charities that help the elderly
• Election campaigns

And disproportionately unlikely to donate to:

• Local social services charities, such as shelters and food banks

Black People

Relative to White people (who are the most likely to give to animal charities), with strongest trends first, Black people were disproportionately most likely to donate to:

• Charities supporting victims of crime and abuse
• Election campaigns
• Human rights and international development
• Charities that help the elderly
• Children’s charities
• Places of worship

And disproportionately unlikely to donate to:

• Environmental charities
• Police, fire and emergency rescue

People Aged 65+

Relative to those aged 18-24 (who are the most likely to give to animal charities), with strongest trends first, People aged 65+ were disproportionately most likely to donate to:

• Places of worship
• Charities supporting troops or veterans

And disproportionately unlikely to donate to:

• Charities supporting victims of crime and abuse
• Human rights and international development
• Youth development charities (sports, extracurricular activities, etc)
• Environmental charities
• Children’s charities

People aged 25-34 and Asians

Unfortunately, the trends in cause support were not statistically significant in either of these groups. In other words, the patterns weren’t strong enough for us to be able to say with reasonable confidence that they weren’t just due to random chance.

Summary and Conclusions

I identified five groups who were less likely to donate to animal charities: men, Black and Asian people, and people aged 25-34 or 65+.

I looked at what other causes each of these groups tend to support, and for three of the demographics, found other causes that they were disproportionately likely to donate to:

• Men: The environment, election campaigns, and the elderly.
• Black people: Victims of crime and abuse, election campaigns, human rights and international development, the elderly, children, and places of worship.
• People aged 65+: Places of worship, and troops or veterans

As well as causes they were disproportionately unlikely to donate to:

• Men: Social services
• Black people: The environment, and police, fire and emergency rescue
• People aged 65+: Victims of crime and abuse, human rights and international development, youth development, the environment, and children

I also found that two cause areas are more popular among non-animal donors as a whole: places of worship, and educational institutions or charities. By comparison, the environment, troops and veterans, and disaster relief were all less popular among donors who didn’t give to animals.

Although these results are a useful starting point, it is important to bear in mind that we have very little information on why donors gave to the causes they did, so it is difficult to draw any conclusions about this. In particular, we cannot necessarily deduce much about underlying attitudes toward animals from the data, since other mechanisms could be at play. For instance, the large majority of animal donors gave to companion animal charities, and it seems likely that whether someone gives to these charities will be influenced by whether they have had companion animals themselves. But that is partially determined by purely practical factors, such as whether someone lives in a rural or an urban environment, which is related to race as well as income. 

We recommend that these results be used to inform directions for further study of how to frame appeals for underrepresented groups, rather than being considered indicative of donors’ reasons for supporting one cause versus another. These results may indicate that advocates need to be more inclusive in their outreach.

Code and Detailed Methodology

A full write-up of these analyses and the R code used for them are available on Faunalytics’ Open Science Framework page.