Animalism: A nascent ideology? Exploring the ideas of animal advocacy political parties
The term 'animalism' denotes the view that human beings should be regarded as animals. This seems to be the ideology shared generally by existing animal advocacy parties. Five out of seven political parties investigated have broad programs dealing not only with animal rights but also with environmental questions and human problems (health care, migration, foreign policy, education and constitutional reforms). Only the relatively new parties in Australia and France focus purely on animal-related issues.
PAUL LUCARDLE: In recent years political parties advocating animal rights and animal interests have sprang up in several countries and seem to constitute a new party family. At first sight, they appear to be single-issue parties, but a closer look at their party programmes suggests that they are developing a new ideology based on the core concept of compassion and adjacent concepts of equality, intrinsic value and interdependence…
In philosophy, the term animalism denotes the view that human beings should be regarded as animals. This view seems to be shared generally by animal advocacy parties, so why not refer to their ideology as ‘animalism’? As it deals mainly with the relationship between human and other animals, it is a thin ideology, even if its core concept and adjacent concepts have implications for other political issues, as the analysis of party programmes has shown.
Five out of seven parties investigated here have presented broad programmes dealing not only with animal rights and with environmental questions but also with human problems such as health care, migration, foreign policy, education and constitutional reforms. Only the relatively new parties in Australia and France focus purely on animal-related issues. Compassion seems to be the core concept, while the intrinsic worth of all living beings, equal rights (progressively extended) and interdependence can be considered adjacent concepts. Compassion is decontested as a political principle rather than a private virtue: it should be organized by the state, rather than by corporations, churches or charity institutions. The state should organize compassion for non-human as well as human animals, such as discriminated minorities, migrant workers and refugees, unemployed and handicapped people. The central position and specific meaning of compassion seems to distinguish animalism from ecologism, but also from ‘compassionate conservatism’ and Christian Democracy; the latter do not aim for a progressive extension of equal rights (by the state) to non-human animals.
The animalist ideology seems coherent up to a point, even if some questions have not been dealt with yet – hence it might be considered an ideology in statu nascendi. How far should equal rights be extended from human to non-human animals? Should domesticated animals acquire full citizenship rights, while animals living freely in a human (urban) environment should be tolerated as ‘animal denizens’ with limited rights, and animals in the wild should be left alone as much as possible, like a sovereign foreign nation, as Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka have suggested?Footnote92 Will the animal-citizens need some kind of guardian to protect them, like children and mentally disabled human beings?Footnote93 Is a subtle or ‘stratified’ hierarchy inevitable?Footnote94 At some point in time, animalist parties may have to find answers to these questions, in particular when they continue to grow and acquire political responsibility. Their relatively coherent ideology might help the animalist parties to grow further and prove to be more durable than prolocutor parties advocating particular interests. SOURCE…
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