By Andres Kogan Valderrama
HAVANA TIMES — The government of Gabriel Boric, which concludes in the coming days, was presented as a transformative project that would advance in different areas of society. One of them was animal welfare, but—like in other issues—it remained largely rhetorical, without deep political backing or real confrontations with animal exploitation.
I mention this because during his campaign Boric promised recognition of animal awareness, an end to mistreatment as a source of human entertainment, and an ethical shift that would include all living beings. Four years later, the balance is a government that, despite late symbolic gestures, perpetuated the structural human-centered approach and avoided challenges to entrenched economic and cultural interests.
One of the most evident contradictions is that this same government once supported the most advanced standard on the matter that Chile has ever had: the constitutional recognition of animal sentience, enshrined in the 2022 Constitutional Convention proposal. That provision declared animals subjects of special protection and recognized their capacity to feel pain; it was a historic achievement of the animal rights movement.
However, after the citizen rejection of the referendum and the failure of the first constitutional proposal—which many of us supported on social media and in the streets—the Executive did not resume or promote any equivalent initiative. It did not introduce bills to incorporate sentience into ordinary legislation, did not prioritize reforms to materialize it in public policy, nor did it use it as a basis for concrete decrees or regulations.
During the campaign, Boric was explicit in questioning practices such as greyhound racing, labeling them forms of normalized cruelty. However, the Executive did not use its’ powers to ban such races by decree. Activists demanded it through marches, letters at La Moneda, and resolution projects approved in the Chamber, but the government chose silence. The issue remains in a slow legislative limbo, without presidential urgency.
A similar contradiction occurred with rodeo: criticized in 2021 as a cruel “entertainment,” in 2022 the Minister of Agriculture, Esteban Valenzuela, signed agreements with the Chilean Rodeo Federation and the Association of Rural Municipalities to strengthen it in the name of rural traditions and social and cultural development. There were no serious regulations, partial bans, or reforms to limit suffering.
The most serious and revealing silence is that of industrial farms: millions of pigs in perpetual gestation crates, cows in continuous intensive milking, animals in extreme overcrowding with routine mutilations. There was no significant update of regulations for production animals, no plans to transition toward less cruel systems, nor a firm stance against this massive exploitation which, moreover, worsens the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.
Consequently, these are not isolated errors; they are symptoms of a political stance that highlights care in the domestic sphere—pets, family grief—but retreats when confronted with what challenges entrenched economic interests, such as the agricultural and liverstock industry and the meat business, which deepened under this government, showing a complete lack of interest in transitioning toward a far more empathetic society.
It is true that there were marginal advances: increased resources for sterilizations, intermittent urgency given to parliamentary projects (updated “Cholito Law,” criminalization of zoophilia, pet theft), and in the last State of the Nation Address, announcements such as a pilot financing program for municipal pet cemeteries, creation of a national registry of those convicted of animal abuse, and reinforcement of sanctions. However, these are more like token gestures.
As a former militant of the Broad Front who believed in profound change, this self-criticism is necessary. A truly transformative government should have confronted speciesism in all its dimensions: recreational, productive, and cultural. It could have left a legacy through decrees against cruel practices, ethical regulations in animal production, mass education in interspecies empathy, and the updating of pending regulations. Instead, it opted for the continuity of a system that puts a price on nonhuman life, treating animals as objects of consumption.
Ultimately, the legacy in animal welfare is a missed opportunity that leaves open wounds: animals suffering in streets, shows, and farms, while empathy is spoken of without real transformation. We need the effective incorporation of animal sentience into laws and policies, and comprehensive care that breaks with centuries of speciesism. Nonhuman animals are not waiting for more promises; they demand concrete change.
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