Paul Shapiro

In 2020, Compassion Over Killing changed its name to Animal Outlook.

Shapiro's book Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, is the first book to explore the work of start-ups that are growing real animal products without animals. It was named as Washington Post bestseller in the week of January 7, 2018.

A copy of Clean Meat is the first book to be have been bound in lab-grown leather. The book, bound in “clean” leather grown by biotech start-up Geltor, was auctioned off on eBay on January 22, 2018 for $12,790. The leather-bound book was featured in many news stories, including:

Shapiro co-founded The Better Meat Co. in early 2018 and serves as its CEO. The company's goal is to help meat producers improve sustainability by blending in the start-up's plant-based proteins in their ground meat products. In 2019. Perdue partnered with The Better Meat Co. and started using The Better Meat Co.’s plant-based formula in its blended line of chicken tenders, nuggets, and patties called Perdue Chicken Plus.

Shapiro co-founded the Business for Good Podcast with his partner Toni Okamoto in 2018. The two co-hosted the first season. Shapiro is the sole host of the podcast’s second season. The show features companies and investors with a social mission to help solve problems such as pollution, food waste, unhealthy eating, animal cruelty, and more.

In September 2016, six female employees at HSUS filed a complaint with HSUS human resources representatives over a pattern of inappropriate sexual behavior they had witnessed over the preceding six years. A month later Shapiro was moved to a different department to "advance HSUS' broader agenda." He subsequently served as HSUS's Vice President of Policy for 16 months before departing to release Clean Meat in January 2018.

In 2008, Shapiro was inducted into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame.

While at HSUS, Shapiro also authored "Moral agency in other animals", published in the 2006 edition of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. He was also a contributor to Animal Welfare in Animal Agriculture.

Shapiro helped spearhead the campaign to end the use of the "Animal Care Certified" logo on egg cartons in the United States. In that case, the egg industry was labeling eggs from hens confined in battery cages as "Animal Care Certified." After Better Business Bureau rulings, federal petitions, investigations at "Animal Care Certified" egg facilities leading to media exposés, and other efforts, in September 2005, the Federal Trade Commission announced that the logo would be removed from egg cartons nationwide.

From 2005 through 2016, Shapiro led many of HSUS's efforts to protect farm animals, including serving as Vice President of the organization's Farm Animal Protection campaign, including efforts to convince retailers, food service providers, and universities to end their use of eggs from battery-caged birds, pork from gestation-stalled pigs, and to expand their vegan options. Additionally, the Farm Animal Protection campaign played a significant role in helping enact Proposition 2 in California, a 2008 ballot initiative that phases out veal crates, battery cages, and gestation crates in the nation's largest agricultural state. The campaign was also central in Proposition 204, a successful 2006 Arizona ballot initiative that phases out gestation crates and veal crates, as well as Question 3, a 2016 similar Massachusetts ballot initiative. It has also helped pass laws to phase out gestation crates and other agricultural confinement practices in numerous other states.

Shapiro received a B.A. from George Washington University in 2001, where he majored in peace studies and minored in religion. He taught peace studies at a public high school in Washington, D.C. He was profiled in a 2003 Washington Post Style section article entitled "Animal Pragmatism: Compassion Over Killing Wants to Make the Anti-Meat Message a Little More Palatable".

While a high school student at Georgetown Day School in 1995, Shapiro founded the animal advocacy organization Compassion Over Killing, and served as an undercover investigator and its campaigns director until 2005. Compassion Over Killing became well known for its investigative work exposing conditions for farm animals on factory farms, at livestock auctions, and at slaughter plants.