Another Argentine court has quietly expanded the growing body of law recognizing legal rights for nonhuman animals. This time the beneficiaries were not chimpanzees, elephants, or even companion animals in the traditional sense. They were two goldfish.
The Criminal, Misdemeanor, and Minor Offense Court of First Instance in Buenos Aires ordered that two goldfish be permanently transferred to the complainant who brought the case, required their well-being to be monitored through bimonthly reports to the court, and expressly recognized them as “sentient beings” and “subjects of rights.”
In coming to its decision, the court relied on a line of Argentine precedent holding that cases involving animals do not concern “inert material goods,” but instead require recognition of the “life and dignity of sentient beings.” It likewise reaffirmed that Animal Law in Argentina has expanded beyond recognizing the fundamental rights of nonhuman animals, “many of which coincide with those granted to human beings,” to recognizing nonhuman animals as an essential component of “biodiversity and sustainable development.”
This decision continues a trend in Argentina that the NhRP has been documenting for years. Argentine courts have now recognized legal rights for a remarkable variety of species, including canaries, dachshunds, and a cougar, in addition to the well-known decisions involving a chimpanzee (in 2017) and orangutan (in 2020).
Just as important as the legal reasoning resulting in these decisions is what the decisions have meant in practice.
Opponents of legal rights for nonhuman animals routinely predict sweeping consequences if courts recognize that an individual nonhuman animal possesses an enforceable legal right. They warn of a flood of litigation and the unraveling of existing legal frameworks governing the human-animal relationship. Argentina has now—once again—provided more real-world evidence that rejects such predictions.
Despite decisions recognizing the rights of such varied species, Argentine society has not experienced the parade-of-horribles so often predicted. Argentina continues to permit the use of animals for food, clothing, labor, entertainment, research, and other traditional purposes. Recognizing legal rights in carefully prescribed circumstances has not dismantled the Argentine legal system, but it has afforded narrowly tailored relief to individual nonhuman animals whose circumstances warranted judicial intervention. In other words, in unique cases, courts have treated sentient beings as more than property or legal “things.”
For those of us litigating for rights for nonhuman animals in other countries, like the U.S., that practical experience—of the society not being upended when a court grants a nonhuman animal a legal right—matters. Courts do not need to speculate about hypothetical consequences when they can look to a country where these questions have already been confronted in practice. The result has not been legal chaos, but a measured, incremental development of the law, one species, and one case, at a time.
Read the ruling in full here (or the translated ruling in English here).