How Mexican Activists Scored a Major Victory for Animal Rights
Dulce Ramírez of Animal Equality on how Mexico came to write animal rights into its Constitution.
filed 02 January 2025
Dulce Ramírez is the Vice President of Animal Equality for Latin America. She joins us today to talk about one of the most impressive recent victories for animal rights: Mexico changing its Constitution to specifically incorporate the rights of animals. As Vox reported, the “changes represent the first-ever mention of nonhuman animals in the Mexican Constitution, marking a milestone achievement for Mexico’s animal rights movement, which has for years been drawing attention to pervasive animal cruelty and extreme confinement in the country’s growing meat industry.” Ramírez tells us what the changes mean, where the movement goes next, and how other activists around the world can learn from the victory of the Mexican activists.
Nathan J. Robinson
We’re really excited to talk to you, because the occasion of our conversation is the tremendous victory for animal welfare that has recently occurred in Mexico, in no small part directly due to the work of your organization Animal Equality. Mexico has enshrined an animal welfare provision into its national constitution. And so what we want to talk to you about today is what it says, what it does, how this happened, and the lessons that can be learned for the animal rights struggle around the world. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what this constitutional provision is and says? How has the law been changed?
Dulce Ramírez
Yes, thank you. We are so happy to see this change on a constitutional level. After almost 100 years in Mexico, it is the first time animals are included in the Constitution as individuals, and not a part of an ecosystem.
Mexico includes these animals in three specific articles. One is educational: the constitutional mandate says all educational programs need to include animal protection in all the books, at the academic and high school levels. The other article bans cruelty. The state needs to guarantee animal protection laws for all species, and one of the priorities for Animal Equality this year was to not exclude farm animals. All the legislation normally excludes those animals, and for the first time, the Mexican constitution includes all animals.
So the article established the first general welfare law, and Congress to be able to create this law for the first time because Mexico didn't have that law. So right now, it’s important when we talk about these animal equalities that the next generation will be born with a constitution that includes animals for the first time in Mexico. So yes, we are happy. And this part of the work took almost four years for Animal Equality, including investigative work, legislative progress in different state and municipal levels, and at the end this year, finally, we have it in the Constitution.
More:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-mexican-activists-scored-a-major-victory-for-animal-rights
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