Animal Liberation: A View from Political Science

Political Science has tended not to problematize human domination over nonhuman animals. Political scientists have been engaged intellectually and politically with other struggles for justice and citizenship leading one to question the apparent indifference to the issue of ‘animal rights’. This paper accounts for the absence of animals in political science research and suggests that recent scholarship has begun to take animal liberation seriously. The paper then looks at the options for the broader animal liberation movement and suggests that incremental change is the best and only option for animal advocates in contemporary liberal democracies.