Legislating Animal Rights

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. What stands out 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: it recognizes only one type of animal as a subject of rights. This illustrates that scholarship on animal rights may not be keeping pace with the reality of how animal rights are developing in practice.