In 1825, after leading the historic abolition of the slave trade in the UK, William Wilberforce turned his attention to another great moral frontier: the treatment of animals. That same year, he co-founded what would become the RSPCA, believing that cruelty to animals was a stain on the soul of a civilized society. He saw the liberation of animals as the next step in a journey of expanding compassion—a journey he hoped humanity was ready to take, and that was 200 years ago…..
Now, imagine Wilberforce returning in 2025.
What he would see is not a world that has grown more empathetic—but one that has industrialized indifference. Far from being liberated, animals have become more commodified than ever. Factory farms confine billions of animals in conditions so cruel and mechanized that they would be unthinkable in his day. Cruelty is no longer isolated—it’s systemic.
“What have we done in the last 200 years ?” Wilberforce would rightly ask.
He would be horrified by how we have normalised suffering. Meat is neatly packaged and labeled, far removed from the lives and deaths it represents. We’ve built a world that makes it easy not to care, and we’ve trained ourselves not to look.
The very future Wilberforce hoped and worked so hard for—a world where animals would be seen as sentient beings worthy of dignity—has been delayed, not by ignorance, but by convenience. And yet, (thank god for that!) there are tiny signs of the conscience he believed in: growing plant-based movements, animal welfare reforms, and people beginning to ask hard questions about the true cost of what’s on their plate.
Still, he would demand more. He would ask why, in a world bursting with knowledge and moral language, we are still so far from justice for animals. So far from true Animal Liberation.
His work is unfinished; I think we can do better.
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