I never gave too much thought about Heifer International, until recently, reading a few criticisms of their work. Many of them are along the lines of "Why donate things that are just going to be slaughtered?" and "Meat is a really terrible way to solve hunger." These criticisms seem to suck, for a few reasons. One is that HI's work isn't, "Here's a cow! Enjoy! They're delicious!" Rather, they promote more sustainable local economies that work well with local ecology and use the initial investment of animals to create a sustainable/self-regenerating source of income. Additionally, I chafe at first world style lecturing on not eating animals. I think that the notion that killing something else for food is inherently cruel is a load of bullshit.

That said, I still have a hard time parsing information out there in internetworld, and would welcome any opinions of the smart folks who are LJfriends. But I'm leaning toward supporting HI. Teaching somebody to fish (and about fish) seems to me to be more valuable than serving somebody a vegan meal. So to speak.

more:
even the better criticisms (the ones that aren't everything that's wrong with rich, whiney vegetarian proselytizers) still miss the mark on a bunch of stuff - namely, I suspect, the actual costs of using animals for farming, by comparing them to subsidies available for industrial animal agricultural corporations in the West for things like medicine in "the comparatively benign agricultural environment of the West" - which, last time I checked, looks something like this.

I tried to dig up what Kingsolver wrote in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" about HI and healthy use of animals for food production, but couldn't find it.

Till then I lean toward being okay with HI, especially if every criticism I read of it is either stupid and save-the-animals whiny, or has huge holes that I can take potshots at, like above.