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Lawsuits Seek To Turn Chimpanzees Into Legal Persons
sciencehabit writes "This morning, an animal rights group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a lawsuit in a New York court in an attempt to get a judge to declare that chimpanzees are legal persons and should be freed from captivity. The suit is the first of three to be filed in three New York counties this week. They target two research chimps at Stony Brook University and two chimps on private property, and are the opening salvo in a coordinated effort to grant 'legal personhood' to a variety of animals across the United States. If NhRP is successful in New York, it would upend millennia of law defining animals as property and could set off a 'chain reaction' that could bleed over to other jurisdictions, says Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a prominent critic of animal rights. 'But if they lose it could be a giant step backward for the movement. They're playing with fire.'"
...I read "Lawsuits Seeks To Turn Lawyers into Chimpanzees".
Humans are used as experimental subjects too and are by all accounts quite tasty.
Well if they all get out their typewriters and start randomly typing.....
Do you think they'd come up with Obamacare?
Oh wait...
Will somebody think of Caesar?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
"Get your hands OFF ME, you damned DIRTY APE!"
I hate every ape I see
From chimpan-"A" to chimpan-"Z"
No, you'll never make a monkey out of me
Oh my God, I was wrong
It was Earth all along
You've finally made a monkey
Yes, you've finally made a monkey out of me!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Jerry was a race car driver.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Okay, maybe he was just a... dragon.
But he was still TROGDOR!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
If you look at the top echelon, it appears a good many corporations beat us to it.
Table-ized A.I.
Does this mean they will be able to vote?
Why the hell not. Couldn't be any better than what voters have done in the last decade or two.
Actually, it could be. Chimpanzees are more intelligent than the average voter. They can smell bullshit a mile away, and don't tend to gravitate towards it.
Hey, corporations are people. Extending that to chimps isn't too far a stretch.
How do we know the chimps want to be brought down to that level?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...there is hope for me, a code monkey !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
...is how this will affect my working relationship with my Trunk Monkey.
Judging by some of what I've seen in the local Walmart, some people are closer than others...
Since we're going to kill to eat, then why not opt for the "mmm, tasty" end of the spectrum?
Apparently, eating should involve suffering. Which just goes to show, my mom was way ahead of her time.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Of course, they'd have to be represented pro-bono. Bo.
That's because we didn't earn that right. We took it! And when the chimps get strong and smart enough to take thier rights back then they get to make the rules.
Hmm. What the heck do you call a monkey in Hyderabad?
Tech Support.
So, if humans can sue to say that monkeys are not property, but deserve rights as humans, then what is to stop my cat from suing to have me legally declared it's property and servant? After all, that would only be making the de facto the de jure.
So chimpanzee rampages through the streets of Manhattan killing some civilians, is put on trial (being a person and all) and is found to be mentally incompetent and placed in a special home with bars for the rest of its life. Or otherwise is found competent to stand trial and is still placed behind bars. Meanwhile a "back to Africa for chimpanzees" is started except that the law prohibits deporting persons born in the US. Later the Supreme Court rules that chimpanzee poop thrown at the president was a legitimate form of free speech, which becomes a milestone in the decline of civilization.
I agree. Free them all. There's no reason for an advanced, "civilized" human society to treat living, sentient* creatures as products to consume.
I belong to redneck PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals.
Now stop trolling me, son, before I make you explain exactly what "sentience" is and how it can be proven.
Excuse me, a cheeseburger awaits.
Free Martian Whores!