Dan Lyons

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Daniel Louis Lyons is the chief executive officer of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK animal-protection charity. He is an honorary research fellow at the University of Sheffield and the author of The Politics of Animal Experimentation (2013). Lyons studies animal research, the philosophy of animal rights, and how animals’ interests are represented in politics.

From 1993 to 2012, Lyons was campaigns director of Uncaged Campaigns, which opposed animal experiments in the UK, especially xenotransplantation. In 2000 he published Diaries of Despair, a report based on leaked documents about pig-to-primate organ transplants carried out by Huntingdon Life Sciences for Imutran. The report highlighted severe animal suffering and helped fuel public debate over animal research. Some material appeared in the Daily Express, and Lyons later used the leaks in his PhD and in his book.

Lyons studied at the University of Sheffield, earning a degree in Social and Political Studies (1990–1993). He earned a PhD in politics in 2006 for a thesis titled Protecting Animals Versus the Pursuit of Knowledge: The Evolution of the British Animal Research Policy Network. The thesis won the Andrew Gamble Prize for outstanding thesis (2006–2007) and the Walter Bagehot Prize for Government and Public Administration (2007).

The thesis became the book The Politics of Animal Experimentation, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, with a foreword by Wyn Grant.

In 2011 Lyons was a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, along with Robert Garner and Alasdair Cochrane. The centre aims to develop expertise on nonhuman animals’ access to social and political justice and to embed animal protection as a core goal of UK public policy.

Lyons also has political experience as a Green Party councillor on Stocksbridge Town Council (2007–2011) and he stood for Sheffield City Council in 2011 and 2012, though he was not elected.