An unsettled legal boundary
When animal protection is discussed, insects are rarely part of the picture. Animal law has historically focused on mammals, birds, and other vertebrates, while insects have usually been addressed through pollination, production, biodiversity conservation, or pest control.
That division is less clear in Chilean law than it may appear. Law No. 20,380 aims to protect and respect animals and to avoid unnecessary suffering. It describes them as living and sentient beings and requires their minimum needs to be assessed in light of science and experience. Those provisions refer simply to animals, not only to vertebrates.
The wording matters because the same statute expressly refers to vertebrate animals where it intends to limit a rule to them, in the sanitary provision on methods for controlling disease vectors. Its rules on experimentation in living animals and the criminal offence of animal cruelty likewise do not draw a taxonomic line. This does not mean that every killing of an insect is automatically a criminal offence; questions of legality, wrongfulness, and proof remain. It does mean that a blanket legal exclusion of invertebrates is far from explicit.
Bees changed the question
Law No. 21,489 on the Promotion, Protection, and Development of Beekeeping expressly introduced the principle of bee welfare into Chilean law. Beekeeping must permanently seek the welfare of bees, considering their management, health, protection, and feeding.
This is not merely a doctrinal proposal or an imported debate. Since 2022, the positive law has used welfare language for an insect. The legislation also requires attention to bees' welfare in connection with pesticide use; SAG Exempt Resolution No. 7,068 of 2024 classifies pesticides in relation to bees and requires warnings designed to reduce exposure. The 2024 regulation on hive transhumance similarly identifies bee health and welfare as an objective.
The resulting legal framework remains largely instrumental: the law stresses beekeeping's productive value and the role of bees in pollination, and it does not grant legal personality or subjective rights to an individual bee. Even so, an insect can now be legally considered from the standpoint of its welfare, not only its economic usefulness or the conservation of its species.
Conservation and welfare are not the same
Chilean conservation rules already mention a number of invertebrates. The Hunting Act Regulations list several groups and species of insects, and certain collectors must register and provide capture information to the Agricultural and Livestock Service. Other species, including the native Chilean and Patagonian bumblebee Bombus dahlbomii, receive protection through their conservation status.
Protecting a species, however, is not necessarily the same as protecting each animal who belongs to it. Conservation law may focus on preventing extinction without considering what an individual bumblebee experiences. Welfare redirects attention to that individual and to possible experiences of harm or suffering.
Science is moving the boundary
A 2022 review by Matilda Gibbons, Mohammad Sarlak, Lars Chittka, and Andrew Crump examined neurological and behavioural evidence relevant to pain in insects. It found strong evidence compatible with pain experience in adult Diptera and Blattodea, and substantial evidence in other orders, including Hymenoptera, which includes bees, bumblebees, wasps, and ants.
The authors do not claim that every insect experiences pain or that their experiences are equivalent to those of vertebrates. Important gaps remain. Yet the evidence makes it harder simply to assume the opposite. This is particularly relevant to Article 3 of Law No. 20,380, which requires animal needs to be assessed using science and experience. As scientific knowledge develops, so do the facts relevant to interpreting that provision.
Chilean law does not currently recognize bees as holders of subjective rights. But it does recognize animals as living and sentient beings, protects against unjustified harm and suffering, regulates experiments on living animals, protects certain insects through conservation law, and now expressly recognizes bee welfare. The unresolved task is to determine how these rules interact—and whether the possession of a backbone can continue to operate as an unexamined legal boundary.