Towards Species-Agnostic Legal Reasoning? Animal Rightsholding and the Legal Grammar of Moral Status

This paper argues that species-agnostic legal reasoning should refuse species as a dispositive shortcut without becoming species-blind. It develops a legal grammar that moves from anti-speciesist critique to specification: species may orient legal inquiry as defeasible evidence, but law must test what its categories reveal, conceal, and normalize. The paper first shows how ordinary animal-law labels organize legal visibility and can hide inherited judgments about value and harm. It then treats animal worlds as legally salient terrain, drawing on biosemiotics to make habitat, relation, sign-processes, dependency, vulnerability, evidence, and form of life part of legal inquiry. An account of intellectual fields, attention, doctrinal competition, expertise, and controlled publicity explains why animal rightsholding must become conceptually and publicly legible without being captured by charismatic cases, slogans, expert monopoly, rights inflation, or unsafe disclosure. The paper then distinguishes moral status from legal rightsholding by separating moral considerability, protected interests, welfare standards, directed duties, personhood, representation, and rights: moral status opens legal grammar, but a right requires a specified interest, duty-bearer, representative, forum, remedy, evidentiary route, and review mechanism. It concludes with a reviewable protocol for species-agnostic reasoning: audit species and legal classification, identify the animal world, test friction, evidence, and false legibility, fit legal form to the animal interest, specify duty, forum, remedy, and review, preserve the animal's form of life, control representation and publicity, and revise institutions when their first categories fail.