A monkey survived eighteen years in captivity only to die before the law learned how to hear her. Along the banks of a river, a judge and local communities sang to it, seeking forgiveness for its wounds and listening for the memories it carries. In an ancient forest, artists, musicians, and filmmakers helped birds, monkeys, and stones appear before a court.Footnote 1 These stories are part of the remarkable transformation that has unfolded across Latin America in recent decades, where courts have grappled with the captivity of parrots and monkeys, the fate of bulls in the arena, the wounds of rivers, and the survival of forests older than the states that govern them.
Between the 1980s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, several Latin American countries experienced major constitutional change. During this period, Brazil (1988), Colombia (1991), Paraguay (1992), Peru (1993), Ecuador (2008), and Bolivia (2009) enacted new constitutions and a few other countries introduced important amendments.Footnote 2 This wave of constitutional reforms in the region, usually referred to as the “New Latin American Constitutionalism,” had common threads that legal scholars have identified and analyzed, namely: (i) a strong bill of rights, combining individual and social rights; (ii) constitutional instruments for the protection of such rights; (iii) the recognition and protection of cultural diversity; and (iv) the inclusion of environmental principles, rights, and institutions, among others.Footnote 3
Although many of these constitutions adopted environmental provisions, only Ecuador’s Constitution included a rights of nature clause, and did so without mentioning animals, while Brazil was the only country to include an explicit reference to animal protection, though it appeared as a minor tailpiece within a broader environmental article.Footnote 4 Despite this limited textual basis, constitutional or other high courts across the region have spent the past two decades interpreting their constitutions in increasingly creative and expansive ways. Through these interpretations, they have developed constitutional arguments to protect animals and have attributed rights to other more-than-human entities. These rulings form a body of doctrine not explicitly stated in the constitutional texts but created through judicial reasoning.
A growing literature has examined aspects of this development. Some studies have identified emerging judicial debates about the legal status of animals.Footnote 5 Others have analyzed recurring themes in court decisions or noted the unusually strong “judicial activism” in favor of animals in the region.Footnote 6 However, this scholarship has not yet understood these developments as parts of a broader process by which courts are bringing animal law into constitutional law, nor has it examined the role of Indigenous epistemologies in shaping this constitutionalization. By overlooking the shared constitutional and interpretive features of these judicial developments, the current literature fails to explain why Latin American countries have become global leaders in advancing the rights of nature and extending rights to other more-than-human entities, such as animals.
This article addresses that gap by outlining an account of how the high courts of Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil have fashioned or expanded constitutional arguments for the protection of animals despite their limited constitutional texts.Footnote 7 The first section shows how these countries are especially well suited for comparison, given their connection to the Amazon, common colonial histories, and an active engagement with the rights of nature. Despite their similarities, courts in all three countries have followed distinct legal paths. As described in the second section, courts in Ecuador and Colombia have drawn on concepts inspired by Indigenous epistemologies, contrasting these ideas with the traditional Western view of animals. Brazil followed a different path: Although it had an explicit anticruelty provision, its courts did not adopt a rights-based approach for the protection of animals until after the regional rights of nature movement gained visibility and legitimacy.
Although these judicial processes frequently drew on Indigenous concepts, the constitutional doctrines that emerged from them cannot be understood as straightforward incorporations of Indigenous epistemologies into the law. As the third section argues, they are better described as products of entangled legalities: unstable legal formations produced through ongoing interactions among Indigenous epistemologies, Western legal frameworks, and other normative orders. Because these concepts continually move across legal and political contexts, their transformative potential cannot be assumed or dismissed in advance. The same doctrines that hold emancipatory potential may also enable cooptation and depoliticization, depending on how they are mobilized, interpreted, and entangled with other legal and political projects, and by whom.
Finally, the article situates these developments within a broader account of constitutionalism in the Global South. It argues that the global prominence of Latin America in recognizing constitutional rights for more-than-human entities is not accidental. Rather, it reflects a form of constitutionalism in which courts play a central role in addressing historical inequality, injustice, and epistemic exclusion. Drawing on debates in Critical Animal Studies, the fourth section suggests that this jurisprudence can be understood as an emerging “animal law from the South”: a body of constitutional animal law shaped by the specific conditions of Global South jurisdictions, and by the particular functions that courts perform within them.
1. Why compare Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil
Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil rank second (Ecuador), third (Colombia), and fourth (Brazil) globally for the most approved rights of nature initiatives, the majority stemming from courts’ decisions.Footnote 8 They have important differences. While Brazil has a population of more than 220 million, Colombia’s is 49 million and Ecuador’s is 18 million.Footnote 9 In Ecuador and Colombia, people speak Spanish, a language not shared with Brazil. While Ecuador and Colombia are unitary republics, Brazil is a federal democracy. Colombia and Brazil have liberal constitutions, which empower high courts to deliver significant social changes, whereas Ecuador has a “radical constitution” inspired by socialist principles, which primarily entitles the constituent power to bring social transformations.Footnote 10
However, these are also similar countries in many ways. To begin with, they share common experiences of European dominance and colonization that loom large in their history. During the twentieth century, they faced several substantial periods of political crisis, instability, or violence that led to institutional reforms.Footnote 11 Today, they are democratic societies with separation of powers and checks and balances, albeit with an undisputed inclination toward presidentialism.Footnote 12 Being among the top five South American countries with the highest number of recognized constitutional rights, they were the three most unequal societies in South America in 2024.Footnote 13 They also share a portion of the Amazon, as the following map shows, and are among the world’s most biodiverse territories.Footnote 14
1.1. Map of the Amazon biomeFootnote 15
Not accidentally, their constitutions recognize the organizations, customs, and traditions of Indigenous people, who are an important part of each country’s cultural diversity. Approximately 7.7 percent of Ecuador’s population identifies as Indigenous, compared with 4.4 percent in Colombia, and 0.6 percent in Brazil.Footnote 16 All three countries have legitimate constitutional courts entrusted with the competence to exercise constitutional review and to review some of the decisions made by lower courts. The combination of these similarities and differences make these countries comparable and provides a basis to assess whether similar doctrines concerning the more-than-human world emerge across distinct national contexts.
2. The constitutionalization of animal law
The jurisprudence of Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil reveals a trend toward reimagining the legal status of animals through constitutional interpretation. Despite their unique paths, all three jurisdictions used their constitutional texts to push beyond traditional anthropocentrism, drawing on Indigenous epistemologies, environmental principles, and regional influences to situate animals within the constitutional order protecting the more-than-human world. In Ecuador, this connection is salient because courts recognized individual animals as rights holders by treating animal rights as a specific expression of the rights of nature. In Colombia and Brazil, courts reached similar conclusions through constitutional environmental provisions, construing Colombia’s “ecological Constitution” and Brazil’s anticruelty clause as rejecting a strictly anthropocentric conception of nature and recognizing animals as beings whose protection carries constitutional significance independent of their usefulness to humans.
2.1. Ecuador: animal rights as an expression of the rights of nature
Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution was drafted to reflect the country’s pluralism and specific historic context.Footnote 17 For this reason, it included concepts meant to speak to that reality, such as buen vivir (good living), Pacha Mama (Mother Earth), and, most notably, the rights of nature. Indigenous concepts have played an important role in shaping these ideas.Footnote 18 Beginning in the 1990s, the Ecuadorian Indigenous community of Sarayaku first used the notion of Sumak Kawsay––buen vivir in Spanish or good living in English––as one of the foundations of their political demand to zones of cultural, environmental, and spiritual protection.Footnote 19 These claims aligned with broader struggles for the recognition of interculturality, led mainly by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), and ultimately reached the Constituent Assembly in 2008, where they were incorporated into the constitutional text.Footnote 20
In the years that followed, the Constitutional Court initially used these provisions to protect ecosystems such as rivers, mangroves, and forests, but in a landmark 2022 ruling, the Court extended their reach to individual animals.Footnote 21 The Court reasoned that the protection of nature and its elements are interdependent and thus should not be considered legally distinct: harm to individual animals affects the integrity of ecosystems, and vice versa.Footnote 22 Because the rights of nature rest on a recognition that nature has intrinsic value, the Court concluded that individual animals––who form part of nature––also have intrinsic value and must be treated as rights holders. Based on this rationale, the Court ruled that Estrellita––a woolly monkey who had been poached and was kept captive for eighteen years in a private residence––was a subject of constitutional rights.Footnote 23
The Court also clarified that this reasoning applies to all animals, not only wildlife.Footnote 24 The ruling established that animals should not only be protected solely for their ecological functions or their usefulness to humans, but also as individuals with their own interests.Footnote 25 To support this argument, the Court cited the Colombian Constitutional Court, which, as we will see, has reached the same conclusion that all animals should be constitutionally protected as a part of nature, and produced an illustrative list of rights for wild animals––including the rights to exist, to bodily integrity, to natural behavior, to adequate food, habitat, and movement––thereby expanding their legal protections beyond traditional anticruelty norms.Footnote 26 The Court also emphasized that animal rights are fully justiciable and may be pursued through constitutional remedies, including the writ of protection and habeas corpus.Footnote 27 This expansion of protection did not imply a prohibition on all human use of animals.Footnote 28
According to the Constitutional Court, this constitutionalism was grounded on a new understanding of nature that “goes beyond the classic anthropocentrism that had inspired the Law during modern times” and is “based on our millenary [Indigenous] roots, and the contributions of pluralism and interculturalism of the diverse peoples that make up Ecuador.”Footnote 29
2.2. Colombia: constitutionalizing animal protection through environmental provisions
Since it began operating in 1992, the Colombian Constitutional Court has described the Constitution as “ecological,” meaning that its environmental provisions protect more than human interests. This characterization is inseparable from the Constitution’s broader multicultural turn.Footnote 30 For the first time in the country’s history, the Constitution recognized the plurality of ethnicities and diversity of cultures present within the nation, and included a series of concrete protections for these communities, including the right to collective property over reserves (resguardos), and to issue binding judicial decisions in their territories according to Indigenous traditions, among others.Footnote 31 Many of these constitutional provisions reflected longstanding demands advanced by Indigenous organizations, such as the Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca (CRIC, Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca), the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC, Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia), and the Indigenous Authorities of the Colombian Southwest (AISO, Autoridades Indígenas del Sur Occidente Colombiano).Footnote 32 As a result, Indigenous peoples acquired a “relevant symbolic role in the construction of the political and the legal imagination that revolves around the Constitution of 1991,” and Colombia’s constitutional framework came to be regarded as “one of the most progressive in Latin America in terms of multiculturalism,” though many challenges persist in practice.Footnote 33
Within this constitutional context, the Court gradually identified a distinctive sensibility toward nature and animals in Indigenous peoples, and drew on these epistemologies to reshape the legal understanding of the more-than-human world. Early environmental rulings explicitly referenced Indigenous understandings of nature and emphasized the need to move away from the vision of humans as “all-powerful masters.”Footnote 34 Although these ideas initially appeared as secondary observations, they gradually shaped a shift toward what the Court later called a “non-anthropocentric” approach.Footnote 35 This shift became explicit in ruling C-66/2010 [the Bullfighting Case], where the Court held that the Constitution requires abandoning the view of animals as mere resources and instead understanding them as living beings who coexist with humans in a shared environment.Footnote 36 The Court identified this non-anthropocentric understanding as one of the foundational elements of the Constitution’s environmental provisions, which together form what the Court called the constitutional “animal protection mandate.”Footnote 37 While the emergence of this doctrine was influenced by the Court’s earlier engagement with Indigenous conceptions of nature, the Court ultimately articulated it primarily through the Constitution’s general environmental principles and related norms, rather than by expressly grounding it in Indigenous thought.
Based on this mandate, the Court later upheld or expanded several protective measures. For instance, it validated a national ban on wild animals in circuses, struck down the statutes permitting recreational hunting and fishing, and insisted that all animals––including bulls––form part of the constitutional concept of “fauna” and therefore fall under the Constitution’s environmental provisions.Footnote 38
Parallel to these animal-focused decisions, the Court developed a line of environmental cases recognizing ecosystems as rights-bearing entities. In ruling T-622/2016 [the Atrato River Case], the Court recognized the Atrato River’s right to be protected, conserved, maintained, and restored. This recognition was justified not only in ecological terms, but as a means of safeguarding the “biocultural rights” of the Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities along the river’s bank.Footnote 39 In conceptualizing these biocultural rights, the Court emphasized that they “arise from the recognition of the deep and intrinsic connection that exists among nature, its resources, and the culture of ethnic and Indigenous communities that inhabit them, which are interdependent and cannot be understood separately.”Footnote 40 The Atrato River case subsequently inspired similar rulings recognizing the rights of the Amazon, several rivers, and a páramo––a high Andean ecosystem––.
Throughout this jurisprudence, the Court repeatedly linked non-anthropocentric constitutional interpretations to Indigenous epistemologies. For instance, in ruling C-632/2011, the Court stated that the understanding of nature as a subject with legal rights “has mainly found justification in ancestral [Indigenous] knowledge based on the principle of ethnic and cultural diversity.”Footnote 41 Similarly, in the Wild Animals in Circuses Case, the Court quoted Indigenous congressman Hernando Hernández Tapasco, who described animals as sacred beings essential to Indigenous life.Footnote 42 And in a concurring opinion in the Sport Hunting Case, justice Diana Fajardo Rivera emphasized that in Colombia’s Indigenous cultures, “human beings are closely integrated with some animals, having myths about the possibility of mixing, and even crossing from one species to another.”Footnote 43
The Court’s increasingly rights-based understanding of environmental protection was further shaped by regional constitutional dialog. It was only after Ecuador enshrined the rights of nature in its Constitution in 2008 that the Colombian Constitutional Court more decisively began describing the Constitution’s environmental provisions as being rights based, explicitly citing the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia in several rulings as examples of “ecocentric” or alternative understandings of nature within the region.Footnote 44
Notably, the Colombian Constitutional Court has so far refused to recognize animals themselves as subjects of rights, overturning the Supreme Court’s habeas corpus ruling in favor of Chucho the bear.Footnote 45 However, the Court has also acknowledged that “the foundations, content, and scope [of the constitutional animal protection mandate] are still in a process of development.”Footnote 46 Given the increasingly rights-based interpretation of environmental provisions and the fact that the animal protection mandate is derived from these provisions, it remains possible that the Court may eventually extend constitutional rights to animals.
2.3. Brazil: from anticruelty to biocentrism
Brazil was initially the only Latin American country to include an explicit animal protection provision in its Constitution. Article 225 establishes that “all have the right to an ecologically balanced environment, a common asset of the people, essential to a healthy quality of life, and it is the duty of the State and society to defend and preserve it for present and future generations.”Footnote 47 The same provision further prescribes authorities to “(…) VII. protect the fauna and flora, with prohibition, in the manner prescribed by law, of all practices which represent a risk to their ecological function, cause the extinction of species or subject animals to cruelty.”Footnote 48 Unlike ordinary anticruelty legislation, its constitutional status allows courts to weigh animal protection directly against other constitutional provisions.Footnote 49
In its early jurisprudence, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court treated the anticruelty clause as a strong, autonomous norm. In the farra do boi (festival of the oxen) case, the Court held that cultural traditions cannot justify animal cruelty and confirmed that the clause applies to all animals, not only those essential to ecosystems.Footnote 50 This reasoning was later used to invalidate authorizations for cockfighting in Santa Catarina and Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 51 In upholding the constitutional prohibition, the Court explained that the duty to protect fauna forms part of the constitutional right to a healthy environment.Footnote 52
The Court reaffirmed these principles in 2016, when it struck down a law enacted in the state of Ceará regulating the vaquejada, concluding that this rodeo-style practice inflicted severe physical and emotional harm on bulls and violated the anticruelty clause.Footnote 53 Although the decision prompted a constitutional amendment protecting the vaquejada as a national cultural heritage, individual justices used the case to articulate broader views.Footnote 54 Some argued that Article 225 recognizes that animals have an interest in not suffering, affirms their inherent dignity, and reflects a biocentric understanding of the Constitution that departs from purely anthropocentric interpretations.Footnote 55
This biocentric perspective was further adopted by the Superior Court of Justice in the 2019 Verdinho case. The dispute concerned a parrot who had been poached and kept in a human environment, and raised the question of whether he should be confiscated from his owner and relocated, or continue living in the same home where he had resided for the past twenty-three years. The Court built on the Supreme Federal Court’s evolving case law to hold that the Constitution requires a rights-based protection of animals grounded in the recognition of animal dignity, under which animals have intrinsic value and cannot be treated merely as objects for human use.Footnote 56 It emphasized the Constitution’s movement toward an “ecocentric framework,” justified this interpretation by situating its reasoning within the broader New Latin American Constitutionalism, and cited Ecuador’s rights of nature provisions, Colombia’s Atrato River Case, and Argentina’s primate habeas corpus rulings as evidence of a regional trend toward recognizing more-than-human rights.Footnote 57
Unlike in Ecuador and Colombia, none of the Brazilian rulings elaborated on the relationships that Indigenous communities establish with nature and animals. Only in Verdinho the Parrot’s Case the Superior Court of Justice alluded briefly to “the ancient Andean concept of Pacha Mama, which regards the Earth as a rights-bearing entity.”Footnote 58 However, this omission is noteworthy. Brazil, like its neighbors, has robust constitutional protections for Indigenous peoples, including the recognition of their cultural expressions and the protection of traditional lands as essential to their well-being and cultural survival.Footnote 59 Yet these constitutional protections did not lead courts to engage with Indigenous understandings of nature and animals in the way that occurred in Ecuador and Colombia.
Still, these constitutional protections have provided an important framework for claims seeking recognition of more-than-human rights based on Indigenous thought. The most prominent example is the 2017 lawsuit filed on behalf of the Doce River, after a catastrophic dam collapse.Footnote 60 Drawing on Ecuador’s and Bolivia’s constitutions and Colombia’s Atrato River case, the plaintiffs argued that the protection of the Doce River was inseparable from the safeguard of the Krenak people, and that denying the river legal standing would violate Brazil’s domestic obligations and the International Labour Organization Convention 169.Footnote 61 Although the claim was rejected on the ground that Brazilian law did not recognize more-than-human rights, the case has been viewed as an unprecedented milestone in the rights of nature movement because it was the first attempt to bring rights of nature arguments into Brazilian litigation.Footnote 62 The subsequent success in rights of nature initiatives in Brazil indicates that such arguments have gained increasing traction.Footnote 63
3. Rights of nature: indigenous origins, entangled legalities
Many of the concepts that the courts used to constitutionalize animal protection in Latin America were inspired directly or indirectly by Indigenous understandings of the more-than-human world and the rights of nature framework. However, the relationship between Indigenous epistemologies and the rights of nature has been contested. Scholars disagree not only about the extent to which rights of nature doctrines reflect Indigenous thought, but also about the consequences of translating those worldviews into the law. The following section examines three prominent accounts of this relationship—Indigenization, hybridization, and cooptation—and then proposes a fourth model, the entangled legalities model, to better capture the complex and nonlinear interactions among Indigenous epistemologies, Western legal frameworks, and other normative orders.Footnote 64
Some scholars argue that the rights of nature and other associated concepts are an extension of Indigenous epistemologies into the law.Footnote 65 On this account, the incorporation of concepts such as buen vivir and Pacha Mama represents a recognition of Indigenous epistemologies within state institutions. Courts and constitutions that use these concepts are, thus, seen as Indigenizing the law in a way that strengthens Indigenous claims, disrupts anthropocentrism, and expands the scope of legal protection for nature and animals. The hybridization model adopts a qualified view of this approach, emphasizing that the rights of nature emerge from a process of translation between Indigenous epistemologies and Western frameworks.Footnote 66 While this model recognizes the emancipatory potential of this constitutional recognition, it stresses that legal incorporation necessarily involves compromise, simplification, and loss of meaning. Therefore, rights of nature doctrines are understood as hybrid legal constructs, mixtures of Indigenous and Western frameworks, that reshape Indigenous concepts to fit liberal constitutional forms. Finally, the cooptation model offers a critical account, showing that the recognition or implementation of the rights of nature and other associated concepts has facilitated the misinterpretation, instrumentalization, or selective extraction of Indigenous epistemologies.Footnote 67 This perspective stresses that Indigenous concepts have been mobilized to legitimize legal reforms while reproducing existing hierarchies and subordinating Indigenous epistemologies to Western logics.
3.1. Entangled legalities
While each of the existing models captures an important aspect of the relationship between Indigenous epistemologies and the rights of nature, none fully accounts for the unstable and contested process through which multiple legalities or normative orders interact with one another over time. To describe this process more accurately, this article proposes a fourth model of entangled legalities.Footnote 68 Rather than treating the rights of nature and other associated concepts as endpoints of Indigenization, hybridization, or cooptation, this approach views them as sites of ongoing negotiation, friction, and reinterpretation. It foregrounds the ways in which multiple legalities––Indigenous and Western, domestic and foreign, rules governing animals and nature in different contexts––interact with and influence one another across different historical moments. It also sheds light on the ways in which multiple actors use and transform these legalities for the pursuit of their own projects.Footnote 69
The cases studied here illustrate this dynamic. Indigenous understandings of the more-than-human world were not simply transplanted into Western law. In some instances, Indigenous representatives participated in the deliberations that led to the rights of nature reforms. In others, courts and constituent assemblies drew on Indigenous epistemologies to reshape the legal status of nature and animals. These concepts then moved across different constitutional and political forums, where they were redeployed by various actors in an ongoing, always unfinished process of entanglement with other legalities, including Indigenous and Western ideas, domestic and foreign points of reference, and several legal rules.
This process helps explain why similar reforms can take on markedly different meanings over time, depending on how these entanglements unfold. It also explains why the resulting legal products are not pure expressions of either Indigenous epistemologies or Western legal traditions, nor harmonious blends or hybrids, but rather distinct formations shaped by their particular trajectories of interaction.Footnote 70 For this reason, these sites of entanglement are best described as unstable in-between spaces of dispute, where Indigenous epistemologies, Western liberal rights discourse, environmental science, and politics all interact, constantly negotiating meaning, and redefining the scope and content of legal protection for the more-than-human world.
Failure to recognize this contested and entangled quality has led some scholars to criticize the rights of nature doctrine in Latin America for not entirely conforming to Indigenous epistemologies or to deep ecology principles. Some, for example, have disputed whether the rights of nature are “quintessentially Indigenous” and have pointed out that “the first to propose the concept was an American lawyer.”Footnote 71 This has led skeptics to question the sincerity of the inclusion of these concepts in Ecuador’s Constitution, perceiving it as a convenient accommodation to obtain political support or as a strategy to gain visibility in the international arena.Footnote 72
In the same vein, others have criticized the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court’s decision in the Estrellita case, arguing that it “mistakenly derives animal rights principles from incompatible rules that are based on deep-ecology ideas.”Footnote 73 But, in reality, the concept of animal rights that the Ecuadorian Court develops in the Estrellita case is neither Indigenous nor Western. To recognize Estrellita’s individual rights, the Court alluded to the “millenary [Indigenous] roots” that underpin the Constitution’s view of nature and the understanding of more-than-human entities’ intrinsic value.Footnote 74 Although the Court did not individualize this assertion in the culture of a particular Indigenous community or a group of communities––in part because it was a constitutional interpretation rather than a factual statement––this does not mean the claim is unsupported. Studying the Ávila Runa community of the Ecuadorian Amazon, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn noted that they “treat jaguars and many other non-human beings as soul-possessing, signifying intentional selves […] for them, non-humans are animate. They are persons.”Footnote 75 This alternative conception of animals as kin is to some extent shared with other Amazonian Indigenous communities, like the Manxineru, for whom “rivers, trees, and animals have souls” or the Makuna, whose “category of person also includes spirits, plants, and animals.”Footnote 76 The animal rights doctrine created by the Ecuadorian Court does not precisely correspond with any of these Indigenous understandings, but neither with the theories of Tom Regan or Peter Singer, which the tribunal also cites.Footnote 77 Rather, it emerged through the interaction of multiple normative sources, also including arguments advanced by foreign animal law advocates.Footnote 78
The previous critiques rest on an essentialist expectation that legal ideas should remain “pure” and internally consistent. When they do not, the concepts are treated as defective, opportunistic, or incoherent. But constitutional ideas shaped through entanglement are, by definition, “impure.”Footnote 79 These doctrines arise precisely because multiple normative systems collide, translate, and reinterpret one another in an unstable borderland, similar to how postcolonial societies themselves are shaped by overlapping, often conflicting traditions.
A further layer of entanglement operates at the regional level. Courts and advocates in Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil increasingly draw on each other’s jurisprudence, a practice supported by constitutional commitments in all three countries to promote Latin American integration and to work toward a shared community of nations.Footnote 80 From this perspective, some scholars have argued that the rights-based protections of nature developed in one jurisdiction ought to be extended across borders to ensure comparable levels of environmental protection.Footnote 81
This cross-fertilization can be described as an instance of a Ius Constitutionale Commune in Latin America––a term that describes both an observable trend toward transformative constitutionalism in the region and a normative agenda to orient this process so that the constitutional principles and values materialize in practice.Footnote 82 In this sense, the recognition of the rights of nature across the region cannot be understood solely as a domestic constitutional phenomenon. Even where courts, such as Brazil’s, have not explicitly invoked Indigenous relationships with nature, their turn toward biocentrism reflects participation in a broader, transnational constitutional dialog, partly inspired by Indigenous thought.
The entangled legalities approach presented here also demonstrates why the rights of nature and other related concepts cannot be assumed in advance to be inherently transformative or not. Because these doctrines emerge through ongoing interactions among multiple normative orders and are continually mobilized by different actors across legal and political contexts, their consequences are fundamentally indeterminate. On the one hand, their deployment may expand legal imagination, strengthen protections for animals and ecosystems, and give constitutional visibility to Indigenous understandings of the more-than-human world. On the other hand, the same processes of entanglement may enable cooptation, including the instrumentalization of Indigenous epistemologies or the depoliticization of their struggles, thereby emptying them of their transformative force.Footnote 83
While recognizing the legal entanglements at play does not resolve these tensions, it explains why contradictions persist and why outcomes can vary so radically in different contexts, depending on how these doctrines are taken up and entangled with other normative orders in practice. The more productive question, therefore, is not whether these constitutional innovations faithfully reflect any single tradition, but how, in practice, their entanglement with multiple normative orders redistributes power and opens or forecloses possibilities for emancipation.
4. Toward an animal law from the south
Failing to identify the shared constitutional and interpretive features of the judicial developments studied here, the current literature does not explain the prominence of Latin American countries in ascribing rights to more-than-human entities. To shed light on this phenomenon, it is valuable to draw on emerging discussions in Critical Animal Studies, where Latin American scholars have asked about the prospects of a distinctive, culturally and politically situated animal liberation movement “from the South.”Footnote 84 Here, the case law developed in Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil could similarly represent an instance of an “animal law from the South,” a jurisprudence with distinctive characteristics stemming from the specificities of Global South jurisdictions.Footnote 85 Although a comprehensive description and analysis of such animal law from the South would require further research into the jurisprudence of these and other Global South countries, this article opens the discussion about the possibility of this new animal law jurisprudence.
4.1. The global south in comparative law
Historically, comparative law has been used to build “particular forms of subjectivity based on the construction of an ‘other’ that synthesizes and incarnates everything that true legal subjects are not.”Footnote 86 By amplifying the worth and reputation of the Global North legal scholarship and practices, and underestimating the value and quality of that of the Global South, comparative law has characterized the former as the legal “self” and the latter as the legal “other” or “barbarian.”Footnote 87 Global South legal ideas have been depicted as marginal, repetitive, formalist, and less rigorous, while Global North legal ideas have been described as foundational, novel, and modern.Footnote 88 For this reason, the field has undisputedly focused on studying Europe and North America––as well as their methods, legal products, and institutions––and has generally neglected the rest of the world while examining other regions’ legal systems only in reference to these “centers” of legal thought.Footnote 89
This arbitrary hierarchy between legal self and other has held up colonial viewpoints, both in the North and the South. The modern Western conception of law has been constructed as the ideal standard, appraising its supposed rationality, secularity, neutrality, and autonomy from other disciplines and spheres of knowledge. On the contrary, non-Western legal systems, rooted in the former colonies or the South, have been disdained as underdeveloped, inferior, and tainted with religion, superstition, custom, or politics.Footnote 90 Situated at the margins of the margins, Indigenous peoples’ epistemologies have been deemed particularly irrelevant to the law or, at best, recognized only as a local phenomenon, unworthy of a comparative analysis and a global discussion.Footnote 91
Animal law has been no exception to this bias toward the Global North and the legal subjectivity it created. Animal anticruelty laws were often used by colonial regimes of the North as a means of domination and incorporation of the colonial subject, considering the former as the civilized and the latter as the barbarian.Footnote 92 Through vague and malleable terms such as “unnecessary suffering” or “humane treatment,” these legal systems used these laws to penalize certain forms of violence against animals and tolerate others.Footnote 93 Often, the practices of cultural or religious minorities were deemed barbaric, unnecessary, and inhumane, while standard, institutionalized, Western practices like factory farming and laboratory research were considered acceptable and necessary.Footnote 94
Today, globalization and the climate crisis have fueled international and transnational approaches to animal law by foregrounding the ways in which animal exploitation and environmental harm transcend national borders. Replicating the binary opposition between civilization and barbarism described earlier, some scholars and practitioners have called for universal animal welfare standards and, in doing so, have often treated Western models of animal law as the benchmark to be adopted worldwide.Footnote 95 As a result, departures from these models in Global South countries are frequently seen not as reflections of different historical experiences or legal traditions, but as a problem to be overcome, attributed to limited capacity or insufficient resources.Footnote 96 As it has been remarked, many of these works have not sufficiently interrogated the colonial danger of universalizing Western practices, even more so when these practices do not question the use or legal status of animals and do not seem to contribute to reducing the number of exploited animals.Footnote 97
In this context, there has been a notable call for more diversity and representation in the field, acknowledging its limitations and colonial risks, and a greater recognition of the role that Global South actors have played in shaping animal protection governance and strategies.Footnote 98 However, these efforts have not yet resulted in a systematic critique or movement within animal law that is analogous, for instance, to the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).
4.2. An animal law from the south
The constitutionalism discussed in this article is characterized by at least three distinctive features that help explain how courts in Latin America have been able to constitutionalize animal protection despite limited textual mandates. These features are not accidental, but rather respond to the specific position that courts occupy in Global South constitutional orders, marked by colonial legacies and inequality.Footnote 99 In this context, constitutional courts are not merely interpreters of settled rules, but rather forums where competing social views are articulated, confronted, and transformed through adjudication.
First, this is a constitutionalism that subverts epistemic hierarchies. Constitutional design in Latin America occurred within an international intellectual environment dominated by European and North American models. These models set the benchmarks for what “modern” liberal constitutionalism should look like. In this context, constitution makers and constitutional courts in the South confronted a paradox. On the one hand, they were “heavily conditioned by the grammar of modern constitutionalism.”Footnote 100 On the other, they recognized that these imported frameworks failed to reflect their own realities. As a result, many Latin American constitutions became mosaics, which mixed “opposing claims, overlapping them with each other” and “affirm[ed] with one hand of the Constitution what the other hand denie[d].”Footnote 101 For instance, they combined liberal and collective rights, Western and Indigenous doctrines, and extractive economic models with constitutional commitments to ecological protection.
In the present case, courts typically viewed as peripheral in the global constitutional order based their decisions, in part, on ideas drawn either from other Global South jurisdictions (pursuing a Latin American Ius Constitutionale Commune, as discussed earlier) or from their interpretation of Indigenous epistemologies. In other words, from sources commonly regarded as second-class sites of “knowledge production.”Footnote 102 By doing so, courts repositioned Indigenous and regional epistemologies as legitimate foundations for constitutional interpretation.
Second, the constitutionalism examined here situates the animal issue within a broader transformative project. In Latin America, constitutional texts are commonly understood not only as tools to organize public power, but as “symbols and instruments of fundamental social transformation.”Footnote 103 Within this framework, courts do not approach animal protection as a marginal or morally optional concern, but as one that reflects how power is exercised over beings placed at the margins of legal and political consideration. Courts interpret constitutional rights in a way that links the treatment of animals to broader constitutional commitments to transforming social structures.Footnote 104 Judicial opinions often explicitly suggest that tolerating violence toward animals reproduces logics of domination that also undermine human dignity and collective life. This reasoning provides a doctrinal basis for judicial intervention, framing animal protection as consistent with, rather than external to, the Constitution’s transformative aims, even where animals are not expressly mentioned in the text.
Finally, this constitutionalism challenges traditional conceptions of who counts as a legal subject and, accordingly, reconfigures access to constitutional justice. Many Latin American constitutional systems emerged from periods of authoritarianism, internal conflict, and the historical exclusion of large segments of the population, including Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and women.Footnote 105 Consequently, constitutional adjudication became a mechanism for addressing this exclusion by expanding who counts as a constitutional subject and who may invoke constitutional protection.
This history deeply informs how courts now conceptualize animals and nature. When courts extend certain kinds of subjecthood to animals and other more-than-human entities, they do so within a well-established judicial tradition of repairing the boundaries of constitutional belonging. This expansion is reinforced by procedural mechanisms that allow courts to counter the law’s anthropocentrism. In a context where the law had historically served both an emancipatory and oppressive role, Global South constitution makers and courts crafted innovative procedural mechanisms for citizens not only to “use the law but also to resist the law and the state.”Footnote 106 In Latin America, the writ of tutela and the popular action (Colombia), the writ of protection (Ecuador), and the public civil action (Brazil) are instances of such procedural mechanisms to resist the violation of individual and collective rights. Courts have progressively interpreted these mechanisms to allow claims on behalf of animals and ecosystems. Through this combination of substantive interpretation and procedural innovation, the move to include animals and nature within constitutional law is not anomalous, but rather continues a longstanding pattern of expanding the Constitution’s circle of protection.
5. Constitutional animal law in the global south
This article examined how constitutional courts in Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil have brought animal protection into constitutional law despite limited textual mandates. Through creative interpretation, these courts have developed a judge-made body of constitutional animal law, extending legal protection, and in some cases, constitutional rights, to animals and other more-than-human entities. In Ecuador and Colombia, this process has been shaped by concepts inspired by Indigenous epistemologies and by the regional rights of nature movement, while in Brazil it emerged through a biocentric reinterpretation of the Constitution’s anticruelty provision within a broader transnational constitutional dialog.
Rather than producing coherent or “pure” doctrines, these judicial interventions created what this article called entangled legalities: products of ongoing interaction among Indigenous epistemologies, Western law, and other normative orders. As a result, the transformative consequences of these doctrines cannot be assumed or dismissed in advance. Rather, they are contingent on how they are mobilized, by whom, and in what context.
Seen in this light, Latin America’s prominence in recognizing rights for more-than-human entities is not accidental. It reflects the distinctive role that courts play in Global South jurisdictions marked by colonial legacies, inequality, and transformative constitutional commitments. By acting as sites where competing normative orders are articulated and reinterpreted, these courts have used constitutional adjudication to rethink who counts as a legal subject and how relations between humans and the more-than-human world are governed. These developments point toward the emergence of an “animal law from the South,” a form of constitutional animal law shaped by the unique features of Global South countries.
Author contribution
Writing - original draft: R.D.; Writing - review & editing: R.D.
Conflicts of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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