Ecuador becomes the first country in the world to give legal rights to animals

The number of cases of humans exploiting and abusing animals has steadily increased over time. However, a South American country has taken a step in the right direction by ensuring that wild animals are given the rights they deserve and can live free of exploitation.

Ecuador, a South American country, has become the first in the world to grant wild animals legal rights. The country’s top court has ruled in favour of a woolly monkey who was kidnapped from her home and placed in a zoo, where she died just a week later.

Estrellita was a month old when she was illegally removed from the wild and kept as a pet for the next 18 years.

Estrellita was eventually apprehended by local police and died of a sudden cardio-respiratory arrest, in less than a month after being transported to a zoo.

Meanwhile, her owner, librarian Ana Beatriz Burbano Proao, filed a habeas corpus petition, which is a legal method for determining whether a person’s imprisonment is legal. She demanded Estrellita’s return and a declaration from the court that the monkey’s rights had been infringed.

The issue wound its way through Ecuador’s legal system before reaching the Constitutional Court in December.

The court found that both the authorities and Burbano had infringed on Estrellita’s rights, with the former neglecting to evaluate her special needs before relocating her and the latter for removing her from the wild in the first place. It’s worth noting that owning wild animals is prohibited in Ecuador.

The apex court of Ecuador said that wild animals have the right “not to be hunted, fished, captured, collected, extracted, kept, retained, trafficked, marketed or exchanged” and the right to the “free development of their animal behaviour, which includes the guarantee of not being domesticated and not forced to assimilate human characteristics or appearances.”

The court went on to say that those rights stem from animals’ innate and individual value, not from their utility to humans.

The court also ordered Ecuador’s ministry of wildlife to develop new laws and procedures to ensure that wild animals’ constitutional rights are upheld.

Kristen A Stilt, a Harvard law professor and faculty director of the school’s Brooks McCormick Jr Animal Law and Policy Program, said, “Typically environmental law has not concerned itself with animals that aren’t considered important species, such as endangered species covered by the US Endangered Species Act. There is a reckoning starting to happen that is breaking down the silos of animal law and environmental law, and this case is an important part of that development,”

Bolivia, New Zealand, Panama, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Bangladesh were among the first countries to recognise nature’s rights.