Ecuador has become the first country in the world to formally grant wild animals legal rights, Inside Climate News reports.
The South American nation's Constitutional Court upheld non-human legal rights this month when they ruled in favor of a woolly monkey called Estrellita, who was confiscated from her home to a zoo.
After being taken from her natural habitat at just one month old, Estrellita spent 18 years living with her owner, librarian Ana Beatriz Burbano Proano. During this time, she wore clothes, ate with cutlery, and slept in a bed.
The woolly monkey was then confiscated by environmental authorities and taken to a zoo, where she died just a week later.
After her pet's sad death, Proano filed a habeas corpus asking the court to rule that her monkey's rights were violated in 2019. The court ruled in favor of Estrellita, stating that her rights had been violated by the government. However, they also ruled that Proano violated the monkey's right when she removed the wild creature from its natural habitat at a young age.
The 7-2 verdict ruling means that Ecuador's 'rights of nature' law has been expanded to include wild animals, and therefore, that wild animals in the nation qualify as "subjects of law".
"Wild species have the right not to be hunted, fished, captured, collected, extracted, kept, retained, trafficked, traded, commercialized or exchanged," the court said in the ruling per aa.com.
Harvard law professor Kristen Stilt spoke about the significance of the ruling to Inside Climate News, saying: "What makes this decision so important is that now the rights of nature can be used to benefit small groups or individual animals."
"That makes rights of nature a far more powerful tool than perhaps we have seen before," she added.
Meanwhile, environmental lawyer Hugo Echeverria said in a press release that the ruling elevated animal rights to a new level in Ecuador. "This verdict raises animal rights to the level of the constitution, the highest law of Ecuador," he stated, adding: "The Court has stated that animals are subject of rights protected by rights of nature."