Animalism: a nascent ideology? Exploring the ideas of animal rights parties

Is a new party family emerging, inspired by a new ideology in statu nascendi? Or are the parties pragmatic advocates of particular interests framed in ideologically neutral terms or terms of existing ideologies? A tentative analysis of the manifestos and other programmatic documents of animal rights parties in Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland suggests the former statement might be closer to the truth than the latter.