Expanding on this, isn't there an aspect of purchasing fuzzies in the usual form of effective altruism? I know there's been a lot of talk of vegetarianism and animal-welfare on LW, but there's something in it that's related to this issue.

At least some people believe it's been pretty conclusively proven that mammals and some avians have a subjective experience and the ability to suffer, in the same way humans have. In this way humans, mammals, and those avian species are equal - they have roughly the same capacity to suffer. Also, with over 50 billion animals used to produce food and other commodities every year, one could argue that the scope of suffering in this sphere in greater than in the human kind.

So let's assume that the animals used in the livestock have an equal ability to suffer when compared to humans. Let's assume that the scope of suffering is greater in the livestock industry than in the human kind. Let's also assume that we can more easily reduce this suffering than the suffering of humans. I don't think it's a stretch to say that these three assumptions could actually be true and this post analyzed these factors in more detail. From these assumptions, we should conclude not only that we should become vegetarians, like this post argues, but also that the animal welfare should be our top priority. It is our moral imperative to allocate all the resources we dedicate to buying utilons to animal welfare, until the marginal utility for it is lower than for human welfare.

Again, just playing a devil's advocate. Are there other reasons to help humans other than the fact they belong to our tribe more than animals? The counterarguments raised in this post by RobbBB are very relevant, especially 3. and 4. Maybe animals don't actually have the subjective experience of suffering and what we think as suffering is only damage-avoiding and damage-signaling behavior. Maybe sapience makes true suffering possible in humans and that's why animals can't truly suffer on the same level as humans.