This chapter analyzes animal welfare texts published by the RSPCA in the late 1830s and written by William Drummon, John Styles, and William Youatt; articles from the RSPCA’s journal Animal World; and the discourse from the Vegetarian Society and London Vegetarian Society. I argue that the RSPCA constructed animal subjectivity within forms of pastoral power that reinforced their subjection. At the same time, the RSPCA’s construction of animals as subjects with thoughts, feelings, character, and individuality cultivated a striking liberalized animal subject that both challenged and reinforced the anthropocentric logic structuring Victorian liberalism. Taken together, all three organizations demonstrate the extent to which animals were influenced by nineteenth-century political thought and affected by governmentality, yet at times succeeded in challenging the primacy of a liberal human subject and the dominance of Victorian liberalism.

This chapter examines nineteenth-century parliamentary debates over anti-cruelty legislation, and argues that while attempts to bring animals into a liberal political community challenged notions of the law, government, property, and human sovereignty, they often reinforce animal subjection. I use the lens of governmentality to show how the debates project regulatory strategies of liberalism onto the animal world, and argue these laws were often less liberating than has been previously discussed. At the same time, however, drives for more legislation led to new understandings of the law, and conceptualizations of certain animals as political subjects challenged major aspects of liberal political thought, such as understandings of property, the role of government, and laissez-faire ideology. These debates, as they took place within parliament and the wider public sphere, constructed a liberalized animal subject with character, simultaneously reinforcing and reinventing the liberal subject.