We Animals

Hi! My name is Jo-Anne McArthur, I'm a photojournalist and the founder of the We Animals project.

My mission with We Animals has always been to tell the stories of invisible animals caught in the human world – those used for food, fashion, entertainment, work, religion, and experimentation.

I have always allowed my images to be used free of charge because, above all, I want the stories of animals to be told. So even if you’re not able to support my work at the moment, know that these photos are still there for you to use when you’re speaking up for animals.

We Animals images have already been used in hundreds of animal advocacy campaigns around the world. They’re being used on book covers, in viral videos, on billboards, in classrooms, and in parliaments around the world, making animals visible in more places than ever before.

Today, thanks to the incredibly generous support of our Patreon family, my team and I have made thousands of images and video clips available for free on the We Animals Archive, with more content being added all the time. From the archive, we send out images every single day, with requests coming in from everyone from the largest animal protection groups in the world to the newest grassroots organization in your hometown. Supporting We Animals is supporting the entire animal protection movement! We want to make sure that whenever any advocate is putting resources together, they have access to compelling images and footage of the individuals we’re all fighting for.

I’m so excited that We Animals now has a small team of creative staff. It’s our goal to continue to provide material to animal advocates around the world free of charge. Having a stable funding base for the team has changed the project and my life, and has meant that the truth about what happens to animals has reached a wider audience than ever before.

Our goal is a stable funding base of $10,000 per month. With this, we can:

• Manage and keep adding to weanimalsarchive.org, a free resource of thousands of high-resolution images and video clips of animals that have already been used in hundreds of campaigns around the world. We have staff working on the archive all the time, adding new content, editing, curating, and making sure compelling images and video clips are available to the entire animal protection movement. 
• Produce an Animal Rights Photography Masterclass to help train more photographers to document the lives of animals caught in the human world. To be released in 2019. 
• Pay for investigations and other travel, including planes, trains and automobiles (The team and I are on the road six to eight months each year), accommodations, food, photography and filming equipment, repairs, hard drives, insurance, and so forth.
• Take on long term projects that allow me and the We Animals team to shine a spotlight on individual industries with books and social media projects. In 2017, with your support, I released my second book, Captive, and ran a companion social media project, A Year of Captivity.
• Employ people to help me with web development, social media, shooting, videography, project management, organizational growth, newsletters and other communications; scheduling the We Animals Humane Education Programs and a growing number of speaking events.

Thank you so much for reading, thank you for your support thus far, and thank you for becoming a patron of We Animals! We Animals asks you to look and to not turn away. Thank you for bearing witness with us. Your support is making change happen. Together, we’re creating a more compassionate world for all.