From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2012:

The “Animal Rights Agenda” 25 years later

“Politics of Animal Liberation” was the formal title of an ad hoc document prepared in 1987 by ANIMAL PEOPLE president Kim Bartlett, Animal Rights International founder Henry Spira, feminist theorist Marti Kheel,  and others who formed an animal rights caucus at that year’s Green Party national convention.  Spira,  who died in 1989,  Kheel,  who died in November 2011, and Bartlett sought without success to win inclusion of the principles outlined in “Politics of Animal Liberation” in the U.S. Green Party platform.

Bartlett,  then editor of the Animals’ Agenda magazine,  subsequently published “Politics of Animal Liberation” in the magazine as a discussion document,  but little discussion followed.  Apparently not controversial with Animals’ Agenda readers,  “Politics of Animal Liberation” was never formally presented to animal rights organizations for ratification. There has never actually been any mechanism through which the many different organizations representing what they perceive as the animal rights cause might have adopted a collective mission statement.  Yet in the years since 1987, “Politics of Animal Liberation” has been extensively reprinted around the world by people on all sides of the issues as “The Animal Rights Agenda,”   and remains widely accepted as such. Read more