In late 2025, Satipo, a provincial municipality in Peru, recognized the legal rights of “stingless bees” to exist, maintain healthy populations, live in a healthy environment, and conserve and regenerate their habitat (Ordenanza 33-2025-CM). Albeit passed on a local level, the development illustrates how animal rights, long confined to animal ethics and animal law scholarship, are gradually becoming a legal reality.

What stands out, however, is that the Peruvian ordinance gives shape to animal rights in a way that differs markedly from the traditional framing of animal rights as a social justice movement aimed at liberating all animals from human exploitation. First, it recognizes only one type of animal as a subject of rights (the stingless bees), and embeds their rights within an environmental framework, emphasizing their rights in relation to their habitat. Second, it recognizes rights of an animal that traditionally did not occupy a central place in animal rights advocacy and scholarship at all: an insect, whose “sentience” has not been proven beyond doubt. This illustrates that scholarship on animal rights may not be keeping pace with the reality of how animal rights are developing in practice.

From insects to turtles – towards “animal liberation”?

The ordinance recognizing the rights of bees in legislation is not the first of its kind: a growing number of jurisdictions is formally recognizing animal rights in legislation. One of the most discussed examples is Panama, which in 2023 adopted a law recognizing the rights of sea turtles. The law received widespread international attention as one of the first national laws in the world to explicitly enshrine animal rights. The law (Ley 37/2023) initially appears to be a conventional environmental protection law, addressing the question of turtle rights only in Article 29. There, it states that:

“[t]he State shall guarantee that natural and legal persons protect the rights of sea turtles and their habitats, such as the right to life and the right to have free passage in a healthy environment”.

During the European Animal Rights Law Conference at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law in September 2025, Panamanian MP and initiator of this law, Gabriel Silva, explained how he navigated the tensions between principled goals and strategic considerations in order to gather support. The decisive factors in the adoption of the law appear to have been, more than persuasive argumentation, the successful involvement of fishermen, indigenous communities for whom turtles hold special cultural significance, and the strategic placement of the article explicitly recognizing turtles’ rights in the middle, rather than at the beginning of the legislation.

Both the Peruvian and the Panamanian legislation diverge from dominant theoretical models of animal rights in two key ways. First, instead of extending fundamental rights to all animals in pursuit of “liberation” from human exploitation, both laws limit rights to a single species – sea turtles and stingless bees – thereby avoiding far-reaching implications for existing animal use. Second, rather than grounding rights in sentience, they embed animal rights within an environmental framework that links animals to habitats and ecosystems, and extend rights to animals that are not proven to be sentient, such as insects. This is particularly noteworthy given that animal rights scholarship has historically had an uneasy relationship with environmental law and ethics, due to the latter’s systemic orientation and tendency to prioritize ecosystems over individual animals. In legal practice, however, this theoretical tension often gives way to juridical compatibility. One example is the Estrellita case of 2022, in which the Constitutional Court of Ecuador recognized individual animal rights as ‘rights of nature’.

The limits of “ideal” animal rights for legislating animal rights

The divergence between animal rights in theory and practice is well-captured by the work of Saskia Stucki on “ideal” versus “real” animal rights, as presented during her keynote at the European Animal Rights Law Conference in Cambridge. Both the Peruvian and Panamanian legislation may be regarded as an example of what she refers to as “real” animal rights: the actual manifestation of animal rights in a specific legal system. As Stucki argues, scholarship in animal rights law has long promoted a monistic and “ideal” version of animal rights “with reference to some morally relevant rights-generative natural quality of animals”. Yet, reality is catching up, and the current examples of “real” animal rights present a pluralistic image of different justifications as well as different kinds of rights, because their ideal shape is mediated by strategic considerations and institutional limitations. The ‘morally relevant rights-generative quality’ seems to have much less relevance in this regard, as a variety of different justifications comes into play. This also becomes clear from the few other animal rights laws that have been adopted, such as the municipal law recognizing elephants’ right to bodily liberty in Ojai, California; a region where no elephants live in the wild. Hence, the “real” animal rights in legislation have little to do with the “ideal” animal rights on which most animal law scholarship has focused until now.

Even if theorizing on “ideal” animal rights may inform what “justice for animals” means, it is thus generally not that helpful for legislating animal rights.

First, the “ideal” version is far removed from current economic and social realities; a problem that has been addressed extensively in the context of animal ethics. As stated, proponents of “ideal” animal rights typically argue for recognition of the fundamental rights of all sentient animals, thereby rendering most existing economic uses of animals (close to) impossible, but have little to say about the “strategies” that can lead the way to such an ideal state. This position cannot inform legislation, since the necessary social and economic conditions would first have to be realized before any legislator could take such a step. It is therefore more likely that the recognition of animal rights in law will take the shape of a transition, assigning rights to animals on a piecemeal, species-by-species basis. Such a model has been suggested by Raffael Fasel in his recent work More Equal than Others, which he considers both pragmatically expedient and politically wise.

Second, scholarship on “ideal” animal rights tends to neglect cultural and legal diversity. It promotes a liberal interpretation of animal rights as centered around classic rights such as to life and to liberty, and presents this as “universal”, irrespective of the specific contexts in which animals live. In practice, however, different societies maintain very different relationships with animals. In some contexts, for instance in indigenous communities, animals form part of complex socio-cultural systems that are not easily captured by a universalist liberal rights framework. As Stucki suggests in her work, it is unlikely that “real” animal rights, as embedded in different cultural contexts, will be as universal as suggested by such scholarship. Moreover, such “ideal” conceptions easily overlook the fact that legislatures operate within highly divergent legal systems, each with its own legal categories, concepts, and constraints. Whereas in one legal system, the constitution may already provide some basis for animal rights recognition, in another legal system, there may be rights to use animals enshrined at a constitutional level, requiring a very different approach.

Third, it is worth noting that the “ideal” conception of animal rights described by Stucki is primarily directed at the judiciary. It links the notion of “having rights” to that of “being a legal person”, grounding legal personhood in some individual capacity of animals. Joshua Gellers has regularly pointed to the problematic dynamic underlying this “properties-based approach”: it reduces the question of how we relate to animals to a debate on which is the “holy property” that determines inclusion or exclusion in the binary “circle of rights”. Moreover, the argument that animals should be legal persons because of their sentience is ultimately crafted to persuade judges that animals should be treated analogously to human beings. This way of thinking typically relies on legal reasoning grounded in the principle of non-discrimination, suggesting that the current exclusion of animals constitutes a form of “speciesism”, and striving for a change of status from “thing” to “person”. As a result, the argument has only limited relevance for legislators seeking to introduce animal rights through statutory reform. Finally, the approach is also poorly suited to civil law traditions, where judges generally lack the authority to “create new law” or alter the legal status of animals through judicial decision alone.

The danger of rights-dilution

Based on these observations, it becomes clear that animal law scholarship has, until now, paid too little attention to what Stucki refers to as “real” animal rights, developing concepts and frameworks that can inform legislators seeking to introduce animal rights laws today. Such scholarship would help bridge “ideal” versions of animal rights with the messy and diverse legal systems in which lawmakers operate. Developing this kind of scholarship is particularly urgent, as poorly designed animal rights laws may become counterproductive, halting rather than accelerating societal change. For example, if a law were drafted that grants cows the right to be stunned at slaughter at the constitutional level, it could implicitly enshrine the permissibility of slaughtering cows. In the long term, this may make it impossible to pass laws prohibiting slaughter altogether: a phenomenon we might call the “barring effect” of animal rights legislation. In such cases, the enactment of animal rights laws may paradoxically obstruct the recognition of more fundamental rights for animals.

At the same time, caution must be exercized to avoid diluting the concept of “rights” itself. When laws recognize animal rights while exploitation and instrumentalization continue, a form of “inflation” may occur that renders the notion of rights essentially meaningless. Therefore, animal law scholarship must remain concerned with refining the normative core that animal rights laws should meet in order to truly recognize animal rights in a thick or fundamental sense. This core should prevent legislated animal rights from becoming empty or merely symbolic declarations, and should include requirements such as:
a) recognizing that animals possess intrinsic value that must be respected (precluding instrumentalization); b) ensuring a high threshold for limitations (so that rights are not sacrificed for trivial human interests); c) leaving open the incremental development toward ideal animal rights (to avoid the barring effect); and d) including provisions for enforcement, either through appointed guardians or by allowing any person to act on behalf of animals. At the same time, as I’ve argued elsewhere, it should allow for sufficient flexibility with regard to the precise norms and contents of the rights legislated for animals: these norms may be different according to place, species, and institutional context. While the normative core strives to be universal, legislated animal rights will necessarily be plural and context-dependent.

The growing number of formal recognitions of animal rights show that we are currently transitioning towards a world in which animal rights in legislation are becoming a reality. It is essential to develop a body of scholarship attuned to this phase, in line with the direction set out by Stucki – one that remains open to the possibility that it is legislators, not judges, who will play a crucial role in shaping the future of animal rights.