 Animal Rights Without Liberation was reviewed by Hadley on the Global Policy website, founder of Animal People Merritt Clifton, an unnamed reviewer for Internet Bookwatch, Rainer Ebert in the Journal of Animal Ethics, and Will Boisseau in the Political Studies Review. Hadley found the most important contribution of the theoretical framework laid down in Animal Rights Without Liberation to be the application of a Razian framework of rights to animals, adding that "assuming that one takes philosophical reasoning seriously, there is little to take issue with in Cochrane's analysis". However, for Hadley, there is a fundamental tension in Cochrane's theory, as there is in most animal rights literature. In denying that animals possess the psychological capacities to value freedom, Cochrane undermines the challenge to orthodox rights theory that it is not only persons who should possess rights. For Hadley, "only theories that have no truck with commonsense intuitions at all, like Bentham's, are really in a position to place humans and animals on a genuinely equal moral plain. The rest, arguably, are more or less disguised versions of the person-centred orthodoxy masked by rhetorical appeals to cross-species equality." Hadley denies that this tension undermines Cochrane's overall argument, writing that it "ought to give no comfort to opponents of animal rights. [Cochrane's] reasoning, assuming you accept animals matter at all, is as uncontroversial as his writing is accessible."
