Animal ethics also stands to gain from an inquiry into the political status of animals. Animal ethics has gone through two periods of development and now stands on the cusp of a third. First generation thinkers identified the original issues and second generation writers refined this work, all within the context of ethical theory. However, though the political dimension of these issues often surfaces, rarely is it addressed in a systematic or sustained way. By not providing a careful political analysis of our obligations to animals, animal ethicists fail to engage in the difficult work of weighing the very important goal of protecting animals' interests against other important social values, some of which appear to be in tension with a universal animal ethic. Without attending to these sorts of political questions, animal advocates will be unable to fulfill the goals of their own movement.In the last decade, legal and political reforms have migrated to the centre of the animal protection agenda as a growing number of scholars and activists work, not just to strengthen animal welfare policies, but to enfranchise animals themselves to liberal democratic communities. Mainstream political theory has remained insulated from these developments. To date, political theorists have confined themselves almost entirely to questions of interhuman social organization, having little to say about our relationship to the natural world and its non-human inhabitants. The purpose of this thesis is to address this lacuna in political theory. I explore two questions: (1) should animals have standing in our political communities, as political subjects in their own right? and (2) if so, how are their political entitlements to be specified and institutionalized?In the first half of my thesis, I examine the underlying causes of the neglect of The Animal Question in political theory and consider two generations of arguments which exclude animals from the polis. First generation arguments take the idea of including animals as members of the political community seriously, but conclude that such membership is not possible because animals lack the capacities necessary for political agency. Second generation arguments sidestep the question of the political status of animals from the outset, aligning the matter with religion and leaving the issue up to the discretion of individuals. In the second part of my thesis, I develop an account of political entitlements for animals and propose institutionalizing these entitlements by assigning animals a set of carefully guarded basic rights, setting a place for them at the legislative table and giving them access to the courts through human representatives.Important in its own right, The Animal Question is also a useful test case for liberal theory. Careful consideration of the issue points to the need for a theory of political membership which disaggregates political agents from political subjects and gives each group its due; underscores the importance of embodiment, ecological dependency and animality generally, in thinking about justice; and introduces a requirement for a system of proxy political representation for any political theory which claims to be comprehensive.