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Should Chimps Have Human Rights?
An anonymous reader writes "A Brazilian court has already issued a writ of habeas corpus in the name of a chimp. And now an Austrian court may well decide that a chimpanzee is a 'person' with what up until now have been called human rights." From the story in the Guardian/Observer: "He recognizes himself in the mirror, plays hide-and-seek and breaks into fits of giggles when tickled. He is also our closest evolutionary cousin. A group of world leading primatologists argue that this is proof enough that Hiasl, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, deserves to be treated like a human. In a test case in Austria, campaigners are seeking to ditch the 'species barrier' and have taken Hiasl's case to court. If Hiasl is granted human status — and the rights that go with it — it will signal a victory for other primate species and unleash a wave of similar cases."
See also: Great Apes Project
Brazilian judicial system is similar to the U.S. one, each judge has the final say over his jurisdiction. Despite of that, Brazil is ruled by civil law, not common law, so the decision of that judge is completely irrelevant for jurisprudence. There are a lot of judicial activism there too, so it is not rare (but it still weird) that a judge bias can affect the decision, on this case, an animal right defensor judge accepting an animal as a litigant, back in the seventies, a judge acquitted a man that was on trial for murder accepting a witness statement from the dead friend which he had communicated telepathically with a medium.
Despite of those aberrations, judicial system in Brazil is not that ridiculous. It is massively slow and a lot of times unjust, but we are not near to give animals (or companies, for all that matters) full rights of a natural person.
FYI there was a proposal in Spain to give to all the non-human Great Apes some very basic rights (they cannot be killed, tortured or keep in captivity).
And the scientific name for Great Apes (humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans) is hominids and we have in common more of 97% of our DNA even with the more different of them (this obviously doesn't make them automatically humans).
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
I think that refers to the "free" in "leader of the free world".
[blockquote]Monkey --> Ape --> Gorilla --> Chimpanzee --> Missing Link? --> Man[/blockquote]
This is a common misconception. There's no missing link that shows chimpanzees ever evolved into humans. The "missing link", if found, would demonstrate that both species came from a common ancestor millions of years ago before the two evolutionary paths diverged.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
It's not an April Fool. See same story dated March 3rd:
l d-first-great-ape-trial-in-austria/
http://chimprescue.wordpress.com/2007/03/03/a-wor
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Nah man, it's easier to tell other people what they should be doing than to do it yourself.
I watched a tv program the other day (that's easy too) about a guy who just woke up one day and said "I'm going to quit my job and start a charity". He told his wife and she said "if you think we can, I'll do everything I can to help". So they did. They took all the food out of their kitchen pantry, put it in a cane basket and went down the pub to raffle it off. People bought the tickets because it was "for charity". With the money they bought more cane baskets and more food and did it again, and again.
I live in Australia, and like many parts of the world we're going through a drought. This guy went out to farms and gave farmers some food to keep them going, etc. He went out to cattle farms where the cattle were getting really skinny due to a lack of grass and bought them hay. One of the farms he went out to was struggling not just because of lack of feed, but also because of lack of labour. I thought his solution to this was phenomonal.. he went back to the city and found a half dozen homeless young guys and convinced them to come out and work on the farm.
My point is.. everyone who says "there's nothing I can do" and has a big bleeding heart for all the pain and suffering in the world then goes back to posting on Slashdot.. there is something you can do. You can dedicate your life to helping people and making it easy for other people to help people. You choose not to. So don't cry about it, live with it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
nothing that exists has a soul, that's what I know.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
And btw, for better or worse, cows are a genetically engineered monster bred specifically for meat and milk. It's not a natural species that humans keep abusing. If all humans would disappear from the face of the earth, cows will perish as well.
The scary part about this is that while the parent was modded funny, bioethicist Peter Singer actually believes killing a baby should be all right until it is a few months old, as his criterion for "rights" comes from the ability to be self-aware and to experience suffering. According to him, the baby won't know, so it won't care.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Yeah, you sure as hell did miss something. You've never heard of José Padilla? What kind of bandwidth do you get under that rock?
The classic experiment is to put a red dot on the animal's forehead, then show him the mirror.
If he acts like, "hey, there's this dog in the mirror with a red dot" he's reacting to what looks like another dog. If he acts like "shit, I've got a red dot on my forehead" then you have a self aware dog.
The problem with dogs is finding something they won't be able to smell on themselves. Unawareness is critical to the experiment.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Apart from freedom from torture, most citizens in the US don't have those rights. Most don't even have the right to basic health care, which is something that the rest of the developed world consistently finds astonishing.
The right to food and shelter is not a "right" afforded to criminals, but a duty of the state. If you want to incarcerate them, you have to look after them.
And perhaps most disturbingly, in many places in the US, criminals do not have the right to vote, even after they are released. So much for "no taxation without representation".
However, most rights still have responsibilities. Freedom of speech, surely one of the most basic of basic rights in a democracy, does not include the freedom to engage in slander or libel. That's an associated responsibility.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});