This article proposes an ecocritical reading of two lithographs by Italian Brazilian artist Angelo Agostini to shed light on the tensions between the abolitionist movement and the animal rights movement in Brazilian visual culture. This question is never discussed in scholarship about nineteenth-century Brazil. Moreover, studies on the history of animal rights in the country focus on the republican period, when the first associations and laws for the protection of animals were created. This article, conversely, reconstructs the history of a seldom-remembered Society for the Protection of Animals, active between 1885 and 1890 in Rio de Janeiro, during the last years of the monarchy. Through visual documentation concerning this society and its negative local reception, I reflect on slavery’s connections to the animal rights debate during the last decades of the nineteenth century. I argue that two causes—abolitionism and animal welfare—were competing for visibility in this fundamentally unequal society. Artists like Agostini contributed to the polemic by using a combined aesthetic that questioned what they perceived as an incongruous situation: protecting animals before abolishing human slavery.