Animal Rights
We don't invest in companies that treat animals as commodities — factory farming, animal testing, exotic skins, entertainment. This isn't a peripheral screen. It's the original premise of the firm: avoiding preventable harm to living things requires taking animal consciousness seriously, not assuming it away.
Ethical Capital was founded as Invest Vegan LLC. The name changed; the premise hasn't. This screen is the most direct expression of what the firm is: we don't invest in companies that treat animals as inputs, extractable resources, or constrained entertainment.
Most funds that call themselves ethical don't exclude factory farming. Fewer still screen for animal testing across both product lines and conduct. We do both — and have since day one.
We apply the veil of ignorance across species. If you didn't know whether you'd be born as the cow or the consumer, you would not design a factory farming system. Cows form preferential social bonds. Whether animal interiority is real is not the question — the applied ethology literature settled that decades ago. The question is whether you're pricing it.
Factory farming. Industries built on treating sentient beings as inputs. Meat, dairy, eggs, hides, furs, exotic leather. The screen is broad because the harm is broad.
Animal testing. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 (2022) authorized non-animal alternatives — but it is an authorizing statute, not a prohibition. Animal testing remains de facto required in most product categories and all major international markets. The regulatory direction favors alternatives, but the transition is measured in decades, not years. Where we hold companies that conduct animal testing, substantial countervailing evidence is required: demonstrated social impact, strong financials, a defensible opportunity set. They are exceptions, not policy drift.
Entertainment. Zoos, circuses, racing. Constrained lives for commercial purpose, without justification proportionate to the harm.
Animal welfare violations are not isolated signals. Companies that treat animals as inputs tend to apply the same cost-externalization logic to labor, supply chains, and environmental footprint. The management orientation rarely stays confined to one category of harm.
— Sloane Ortel, Founder & CIO
See § 2.1 of our screening policy for the full criteria.
What we exclude
- Meat, dairy, egg, and honey producers — any company whose primary product involves animal exploitation
- Animal testing — pharmaceuticals and cosmetics that use live-animal testing as standard practice
- Leather, fur, silk, and animal-derived material suppliers
- Fishing tackle, factory farm husbandry equipment, and other products designed to facilitate animal harm
- Direct harm to non-human animals through hostile practices or neglect (§ 3.1)
Factory farming is a structurally bad business
We excluded this sector on ethical grounds first. The financial case came free.
Industrial animal agriculture operates on thin margins, relies on commodity inputs it cannot control, and carries biosecurity risk that is fundamentally unhedgeable. A single avian flu outbreak erases a year's margin before price increases can pass through. There is no moat. The product is undifferentiated. The largest operators compete on scale alone — which concentrates biosecurity and regulatory exposure rather than diversifying it.
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