Political Animals and Animal Politics is a 2014 edited collection published by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by the green political theorists Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg. The work addresses the emergence of academic animal ethics informed by political philosophy as opposed to moral philosophy. It was the first edited collection to be published on the topic, and the first book-length attempt to explore the breadth and boundaries of the literature. As well as a substantial introduction by the editors, it features ten sole-authored chapters split over three parts, respectively concerning institutional change for animals, the relationship between animal ethics and ecologism, and real-world laws made for the benefit of animals. The book's contributors were Wissenburg, Schlosberg, Manuel Arias-Maldonado, Chad Flanders, Christie Smith, Clemens Driessen, Simon Otjes, Kurtis Boyer, Per-Anders Svärd, and Mihnea Tanasescu. The focus of their individual chapters varies, but recurring features include discussions of human exceptionalism, exploration of ways that animal issues are or could be present in political discourse, and reflections on the relationship between theory and practice in politics. In part, Political Animals and Animal Politics arose from a workshop that Wissenburg and Schlosberg organised at the 2012 European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions conference, though not all attendees contributed to the volume and not all contributors presented at the workshop. Footage of the workshop appeared in De Haas in de Marathon (The Pacer in the Marathon), a 2012 documentary about the Dutch Party for the Animals. Political Animals and Animal Politics was published as part of the Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, edited by Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn. Reviewers identified the contributions from Driessen, Flanders and Boyer as of particular interest, but challenged the inclusion of chapters focused on the environment. They criticised the book's failure to include contributions from, or sufficiently engage with the work of, the key voices in the politically focused animal ethics literature, such as Robert Garner, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Alasdair Cochrane, Kimberly Smith, or Siobhan O'Sullivan. Wissenburg's chapter was identified as the one that engaged most directly with this literature, but his approach was a negative one. Garner has written that Political Animals and Animal Politics should be praised for its trailblazing, but predicted that it would be superseded by stronger collections on the same theme.
Production and release The Dutch green political theorist Marcel Wissenburg and the American green political theorist David Schlosberg organised a workshop entitled "Political Animals and Animal Politics" at the 2012 European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions conference, which was held at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, between 10 and 15 April 2012. The two had been talking for around a year about organising a conference broadly on the theme of "nature, animals and political theory". The workshop aimed to fill a gap in the political literature on the status of nonhuman animals, something, they claimed, previously considered only at the margins of work otherwise about the environment/resource management, or else by those more primarily interested in moral issues. Both Wissenburg and Schlosberg presented papers; papers were also presented by Manuel Arias-Maldonado (University of Granada), Susan Boonman-Berson (Wageningen University and Research), Kurtis Boyer (Lund University), Clemens Driessen (Utrecht University), Chad Flanders (Saint Louis University), Robert Garner (University of Leicester), Margareta Hanes (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Paul Lucardie (University of Groningen), Christopher Neff (University of Sydney), Kaspar Ossenblok (Ghent University), Simon Otjes (Leiden University), Christie Smith (University of Exeter), Mihnea Tanasescu (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Catherine Zwetkoff (University of Liège). For Schlosberg, the workshop, and the wide range of papers presented, illustrated the "coming-of-age of animal politics as a subfield of political theory".
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