Animal Protection in the Anthropocene

Abstract: Increasing knowledge of animals’ physical and emotional needs calls for a constant revision of how to best protect them through legislation – a contentious issue with two main perspectives: animal rights and animal welfarism. The two perspectives represent an anthropocentric and a post-anthropocentric ethical approach to animal protection, making the subject interesting also as a case of balancing human and non-human interests in politics. This study takes a closer look at how the animal rights and the animal welfarist perspectives can be seen in the Swedish parliamentary debate on animal protection. To investigate this, a mixed methods approach with a modified version of ideal type analysis and content analysis was used. The results show that both the animal welfarism and the animal rights perspectives could be seen in the Swedish parliamentary debate between 2011 and 2021. While no significant change in frequency of the use of the different perspectives over the studied time period could be identified, there were other changes in the debate relating to the use of rhetoric, roles of certain parties, and an increased attention to zoonotic disease prevention after 2020. Further studies are required to make generalizable conclusions regarding the presence of post-anthropocentric ethics in today’s politics.