Pledge kindness to all animals

Your Guide to Fulfilling the Kind to All Animals Pledge

Thank you for taking the Kind to All Animals Pledge!

This guide provides practical advice for fulfilling each part of your commitment to help pets, wildlife, laboratory animals, and farmed animals.

πŸ• For Pets

"I pledge to prioritize adoption for future pets, giving animals in need loving homes and a second chance"

Why This Matters

Adopting from shelters or rescues rather than purchasing from breeders helps save one of the 6.3 million companion animals entering U.S. shelters each year. Approximately 920,000 of these animals are euthanized because they can't find homes.1

Your choice directly reduces demand for breeding operations that often prioritize profit over animal welfare, leading to overcrowding, inbreeding, and inadequate care. By choosing adoption, you're:

  • Giving a deserving animal a second chance at life

  • Freeing up shelter space for another animal in need

  • Avoiding supporting puppy and kitten mills with documented welfare problems

  • Often getting a pet that's already vaccinated, spayed/neutered, and microchipped

While adoption may not be possible in every situation, and sometimes requires additional searching for specific traits or needs, prioritizing this option whenever feasible makes a meaningful difference.

Simple Ways to Help

If you're considering a new pet:

  • Visit your local animal shelters or rescue organizations first

  • Check adoption websites like Petfinder or Adopt-a-Pet

  • Consider adult or senior animals who often wait longer for homes

  • Look into fostering if you're not ready for permanent adoption

Even if you're not looking to add a pet right now:

  • Share adoptable pets from your local shelter on social media

  • Volunteer as a dog walker or cat socializer at a shelter

  • Donate gently used blankets, towels, or pet supplies

  • Help friends or family who want a pet to explore adoption options

🦊 For Wildlife

"I pledge to to use only humane methods for pest control in my home"

Why This Matters

You might be surprised to learn that common pest control methods cause avoidable suffering at a massive scale. Millions of wild animals are killed through pest management schemes each year, even though humane alternatives exist2

Traditional methods like glue traps cause extreme suffering. Poisons can create a deadly chain reaction: with poisoned rodents being eaten by other animals causing secondary poisoning that kills owls, hawks, foxes, and even pets.

Using humane pest control methods prevents unnecessary suffering for wild animals that occasionally share our living spaces. This small effort dramatically reduces suffering and can be more effective long-term

Simple Ways to Help

Prevention (most effective):

  • Seal cracks and entry points around your home

  • Keep food in sealed containers

  • Remove potential nesting materials near your home

  • Trim tree branches away from your roof

Humane control methods:

  • Use live capture traps (check them at least daily)

  • Try ultrasonic repellers for rodents or contraceptive baits that prevent reproduction rather than causing death

  • If animals are already nesting, wait until babies are grown before excluding them

If lethal control is unavoidable:

  • Choose quick-kill snap traps over poisons or glue traps, as they cause significantly less suffering

  • Never use glue traps, which cause extreme suffering

  • Avoid poisons, which are often cruel and lead to secondary poisoning of predators

If you need professional help:

  • Look for companies that advertise "humane" or "wildlife exclusion" services

  • Ask about their methods before hiring them

  • Request they use exclusion rather than lethal methods

πŸ‡ For Lab Animals

"I pledge to choose cruelty-free personal care products certified by independent organizations"

Why This Matters

Choosing cruelty-free personal care products helps reduce demand for animal testing that subjects millions of rabbits, monkeys, guinea pigs, mice, and rats to painful and unnecessary experiments.

These tests can involve forced chemical exposure, eye and skin irritation tests, and lethal dose studies where animals are forced to ingest substances until they die.3

It’s easy to avoid animal tested products, most everyday items have cruelty-free alternatives at competitive prices, making this an easy one-off habit change. By supporting companies that don't test on animals, you're also encouraging the development and adoption of modern, more accurate testing methods that don't rely on animals.

Simple Ways to Help

When shopping:

  • Look for certified logos like Leaping Bunny, PETA's Beauty Without Bunnies, or Choose Cruelty Free

  • Use apps like the Leaping Bunny to scan barcodes while shopping

  • Remember that many mainstream brands are now cruelty-free, so you may not need to change your favorites!

Additional steps:

  • Look beyond cosmetics to household cleaning products

  • Share information about cruelty-free brands with friends and family

  • Consider contacting favorite brands that aren't cruelty-free to ask them to change their practices

πŸ„ Farmed Animals

"I pledge to donate regularly to expert-recommended charities working to end the cruelest factory farming practices"

Why This Matters

The numbers of factory farmed animals can be overwhelming, so let’s talk about one individual instead. Meet Pecky:

Like most egg-laying hens in America, Pecky spent most of her life in a small metal cage about with about as much space as a piece of printer paper, unable even to stretch her wings. Barely able to move, the wire of the cage cutting into her feet. Surrounded by the noise of thousands of other chickens. Her nostrils filled with burning fumes from their dung.

Luckily she, along with 435 other chickens from the same operation, was rescued. She now lives at a local sanctuary where she spends her days doing what chickens naturally love: taking dust baths, foraging in green pastures, and living freely among other rescued hens. For the first time in her life, she can spread her wings.

Pecky's story of transformation is beautiful, but sadly still rare. Today, 99% of farm animals live on factory farms, kept in unnatural, often dirty and stressful conditions.4

While companion animals receive 97% of all animal charity donations, factory-farmed animals – who make up 99% of animals under human care – receive just 3% of charitable support. These animals face some of the most severe welfare challenges yet receive the least attention.5

Simple Ways to Help

Regular donations to expert-recommended charities help improve the lives of billions of animals suffering in factory farms. These organizations eliminate the cruelest practices through corporate campaigns, policy reform, and innovation.

For impact-to-effort, nothing beats donating: just $23 monthly can do as much good as not eating any animal products at all (helping 48 animals a month!)6

Effective charities create real, measurable improvement in the lives of these animals through:

  • Corporate campaigns that convince major companies to adopt higher welfare standards

  • Legislative action that establishes basic protections for farmed animals

  • Innovation that develops alternatives to factory farming

Our Expert-Recommended Charities

All of our top animal charities are included when you donate through the Impact Fund, while some of charities with programs that make a particularly big difference to combatting climate change are in the Climate Fund.

= Climate fund

Share the pledge

Join the challenge

Spoil your pet with something over-the-top while pledging kindness to ALL animals.

☝️ Watch our example to see how it's done!

Create your #PledgeKindness video

1 Use Our Audio

Use the audio from our post explaining the pledge: Instagram TikTok

2 Go Over-the-Top for Your Pet

Get creative with it! Here are some ideas to get you started:

Let doggy get dirty

Let doggy get dirty

Cat spa day

Cat spa day

Build a bunny castle

Build a bunny castle

Hamster spaghetti dinner

Hamster spaghetti dinner

Or simply show your pet enjoying their favorite treat or activity!

3 Show Your Pledge Number (optional)
Pledge GIF

Search for #pledgekindness in Insta/TikTok’s sticker library and add your pledge number (sent to you by email)

4 Tag Friends and Share

Tag at least 3 friends to challenge them to take the pledge next, then post on social media 😊

Feeling lazy?

If you don't want to make a video, you can post a photo instead, showing off your pledge number with our GIF and tagging 3 friends. Or if that's too much, copy the template description and make a text-only post! There's something for every motivation level 😊

Footnotes:

1. ASPCA: Pet Statistics: Approximately 6.3 million companion animals enter U.S. animal shelters nationwide every year. Of those, approximately 3.1 million are dogs and 3.2 million are cats. Each year, approximately 920,000 shelter animals are euthanized (390,000 dogs and 530,000 cats). The number of dogs and cats euthanized in U.S. shelters annually has declined from approximately 2.6 million in 2011. [↑]

2. Universities Federation for Animal Welfare: Many millions of rats and mice are estimated to be killed globally as pests every year. Two commonly used methods are glue traps and poisons. [↑]

3. Cruelty Free International: Tests include dripping cosmetics chemicals into animals’ eyes, shaving their fur and rubbing them into their exposed skin or forcing them down their throats. Once the tests are over, the animals will be killed and dissected. [↑]

4. Our World In Data: Estimates that 99% of livestock in the US were factory-farmed in 2022. That was just over 10 billion animals. More than the global human population. [↑]

5. Animal Charity Evaluators: About 95% of donations to animal charities in the U.S. go to companion animal organizations, 2% go to laboratory animal organizations, and just 3% go specifically to farmed animal organizations. [↑]

6. FarmKind: See our Compassion Calculator [↑]