Introduction

The Nonhuman Rights Project exists to secure fundamental legal rights for nonhuman animals. That goal requires sustained, long-term effort to overcome a legal system whose inertia continues to block well-established principles of justice, liberty, and equality from being fairly applied to animals. In 2025, we took significant steps forward on multiple fronts.

One of the most important stories of 2025 is the development of additional legal strategies beyond habeas corpus cases seeking a right to bodily liberty for cognitively advanced animals. Informed by how courts have reacted to our habeas corpus cases, we completed a 115-page “Access to Justice” research project evaluating 17 potential interventions aimed at developing procedural rules to treat animals like subjects of the legal system entitled to fair process and protection. That research led to our “Freedom from Cruelty” strategy which seeks recognition that existing anticruelty laws create enforceable rights belonging to animals themselves while also providing a solution to the problem that anticruelty laws often go unenforced. In early 2026, we went public with that theory in a case filed on behalf of the approximately 2,000 beagle dogs and puppies held in cruel conditions at Ridglan Farms in Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, we continued our historic habeas corpus work seeking liberty for 21 nonhuman animal clients across five states. In January 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court addressed whether elephants held captive at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo are entitled to bodily liberty, making it only the second U.S. state high court to take up the question. In October, the Michigan Court of Appeals heard and rendered a decision in our case on behalf of the chimpanzees held captive at the DeYoung Family Zoo, a case supported by world-renowned primatologists including the late Jane Goodall. We also filed new habeas corpus petitions in Los Angeles and Pennsylvania, bringing the question of elephant liberty before courts in both states for the first time. In Pennsylvania, those filings led to hearings and, in early 2026, the third habeas corpus order for a nonhuman animal in U.S. history.

While there were meaningful victories within these cases, they did not produce all of the outcomes we sought. Even so, each hearing and decision requires courts to articulate on the record why animals should be denied equitable treatment, propelling the conversation and informing our strategy going forward. Each of these cases is described in detail later in this report.

Beyond our own cases, we expanded our amicus strategy in 2025 to bolster developments in animal legal status that strengthen the foundation for our litigation. In New York, a court relying extensively on our amicus brief held for the first time that a dog qualifies as an "immediate family member" for purposes of an emotional distress claim. In California, we filed an amicus brief arguing that animal suffering qualifies as the kind of harm the necessity defense is designed to prevent. Advances like these shift how courts see animals across the law, creating precedent and reasoning that supports our rights-based work. We also commissioned national and state-level public opinion research, and that data is already informing our strategy and communications. We launched an externship program to develop the next generation of animal rights lawyers, carrying forward the vision of our founder, Steven Wise. And our work reached an estimated audience of nearly 370 million people through national and international media coverage that increasingly treats these legal questions with the seriousness they deserve.

The legal system's treatment of animals has yet to catch up with 150 years of progress in science, public opinion, and the law itself. We closed some of that gap in 2025 and laid the groundwork for the breakthroughs ahead. Challenging this requires not just strong arguments but the resources to present them year after year, state after state. Your support is what makes that possible, and what allows us to keep fighting for a legal system that treats animals fairly.

Thank you.

Christopher Berry
Executive Director, the NhRP