He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics.

This aspect of his thought has generated responses by others, including the political theorist Robert Garner and the philosopher John Hadley, who argue that there may be reasons to claim that nonhuman animals do possess an interest in freedom.

Cochrane has also proposed a cosmopolitan alternative to Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's picture of a political animal rights, explicated in their 2011 book Zoopolis.

Though Donaldson and Kymlicka have defended their account against Cochrane's criticism, they have said that they welcome attempts to develop alternative political theories of animal rights to their own.

The first piece of "pro-animal" scholarship he wrote was his undergraduate dissertation, in which he explored the possibility of a reconciliation between sustainable development and animal rights.

[5][7] His thesis, supervised by Fabre with Paul Kelly acting as an advisor,[8] was entitled Moral obligations to non-humans.

[5][6] In 2009, he published articles in Utilitas[13] and Political Studies[14] defending his "liberty thesis", the idea that nonhuman animals lack an intrinsic interest in freedom.

[15] This claim has attracted article-length responses from the political theorist Robert Garner,[15] and the philosophers John Hadley,[16] Andreas T. Schmidt,[17] and Valéry Giroux.

He then considers the place of nonhuman animals in utilitarian, liberal, communitarian, Marxist and feminist political theory, concluding that no single tradition is sufficient to account for the place nonhuman animals should have in politics, but that all have something worthwhile to offer to the debate.

[21] The CASJ is a think tank that aims to bring academics and policy makers together with a view to understanding and furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals.

[24] The book is based upon the research he completed during his PhD at LSE, and offers an extended defence of the theoretical basis and practical consequences of his interest-based rights account of animal ethics.

[24] In 2013 he edited a special section in the journal Global Policy entitled "International Animal Protection"; the section included articles by the philosopher Oscar Horta, the environmental law scholar Stuart R. Harrop and the animal law scholar Steven White, with an introduction by Cochrane.

[25] He also contributed to the inaugural issue of the journal Law, Ethics and Philosophy as a part of a symposium on Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's Zoopolis.

[23] He is a leading figure in what Garner calls the "political turn in animal ethics", though precisely what this means is disputed.

[33] The literature to which these authors variously refer explores the relationships of humans and nonhuman animals from the perspective of normative political theory.

Cochrane, Garner and O'Sullivan argue both that the new literature is importantly unified and that it is distinct from more traditional approaches to animal ethics, presenting the focus on justice as the key feature.

Cochrane draws out several aspects of this account, which serves as the basis of the analysis in his Animal Rights Without Liberation[40] and elsewhere.

[43] The account is for moral rights, and Cochrane's normative claims are intended to form part of a "democratic underlaboring", informing and persuading political communities.

[48] In his interest-based rights approach, Cochrane draws upon a number of normative theories, but most particularly utilitarianism and liberalism,[49] and the framework has been presented by commentators as a possible middle-ground between the rights theory of Regan and the utilitarian account offered by Peter Singer.

[52] Interest-based approaches to animal ethics have become significant in recent academic literature; Milligan identifies "a strong emphasis upon animal interests but in the context of a rights theory rather than a Singer-style consequentialism" as one of the key components of the political turn.

[53] Cochrane's "liberty thesis"[15] is that nonhuman animals—with the possible exception of some great apes and cetaceans—do not have an intrinsic interest in freedom.

Indeed, merely a right against suffering, Garner suggests, could go a long way towards achieving the abolitionist goal of the end of animal industry.

[60] The abolitionist theorist Jason Wyckoff draws attention to Cochrane's argument that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in not being owned.

Both of these assumptions are false, claim Wyckoff, as though "instances of possession, use, and transfer may possibly not violate the interests of an individual, the systematic treatment of that individual as the kind of entity that can be possessed, used, and transferred constructs that entity and others like it (or him, or her) as an object, and when that entity is a moral patient with interests, that construction as an object subordinates the interests of that patient and similar patients to those who benefit from the objectification of the individual".

[27] Ahlhaus and Niesen consider Cochrane's criticism of Donaldson and Kymlicka valuable, but question the extent to which his "cosmozoopolis" picture is compatible with his liberty thesis.

[28] Despite this, they say that, citing Cochrane's cosmozoopolis picture as an example, "one of [their] aims is to inspire people to develop ... alternative political theories of animal rights" to their own.

[65] Cochrane is of the view that "a lack of a clear, focused and coherent set of international standards and policies for animal protection is an important contributing factor" to the gulf between the theoretical and legal valuation of nonhuman animals and their treatment around the world.

[66] With Steve Cooke, he argues that it is theoretically acceptable—drawing upon Simon Caney's account of just war—for states to go to war to protect nonhuman animals.