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Despite the diverse representations of animal advocates included in animal advocacy documentaries, most research on these films has focused on content and discourse analysis, 1 or on how human animal advocates frame nonhuman animal advocacy. 2 To our knowledge, no research has been conducted on animal advocates’ profiles and how they have evolved, despite the potential utility of such an analysis for the communication strategy of the animal defence movement. The research we present in this chapter aims to fill this gap by examining the self-representation of animal activists in animal advocacy documentaries.

Although there are some earlier examples (eg, The Animals Film [1981]), it was not until the 1990s that the animal advocacy movement began to make regular use of documentaries to spread its message, most notably with the release of It’sa Dog’s Life (1997), a film produced by Small World for Channel 4 in the UK, which exposed the abuse of animals at the Huntington Life Sciences animal testing centre. The documentary’s main character and activist, Zoe Broughton, used warfare tactics such as infiltration, spying and undercover filming in her advocacy in the film. Since then, this frame of animal activists as