Abstract
While the rest of the animals sink in the juridical ocean of living things, an ape is transformed into a non-human legal entity. Through the emblematic judicial course taken by the orangutan Sandra from the former Buenos Aires Zoo, we will pick up the arguments legitimizing Sandra's transformation from object to subject. The use of judicial guarantees is symptomatic of how protectionist movements view their relationship with these sentient creatures: it involves achieving an accurate moral closeness with these animals, adjusting the distance and interaction until they coincide with the protectionist representation of these animals. However, access to justice for the apes remains a paradox in a context of profoundly unequal societies, such as Argentina, in which hundreds of human beings are deprived of rights and means for legal representation for their claims. If the animal issue becomes autonomous, the possibility of giving these new applications of legal tools an emancipating nature decreases. How can the animal question be re-politicized in order to be addressed to the broader issues of inequality in our societies?
Keywords
Animal rights; legal entity; habeas corpus; moral closeness; animal ethics