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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.'"
Millions of people vote who don't pay income taxes. I guess these apes will probably be voting for Democrats (aka GimmeDats) just like those millions.
Of course. Someone has to vote for the Democrats after the ObamaCare fiasco hits by the 2020 election.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Chimps, for example, are a different species; chimps and humans can't have offspring.
Lots of humans can't have offspring. Are they then a different species?
Their brains are obviously quite different.
The point is?
They are also vicious and aggressive animals.
I'd argue that some humans are more vicious and aggressive.
Enlightenment philosophers generally recognized that animals could suffer and that humans had some moral responsibility towards them, but did not generally recognize them as persons.
I'm sure they also didn't recognize blacks as being equal to whites, or that gays should be able to marry. Times change, so does thinking on what's right and wrong.
It seems to me that scientists have judged animals as guilty of being unconscious until proven conscious. This seems backward to me as we know that there is no magical 'stuff' that humans have that animals don't. Also, through evolution consciousness has been built up over the eons through layers in the brain. To say that somehow consciousness was just suddenly switched on 100,000 years ago just seems absurd.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
You probably have a reasonable point in there somewhere, but you're going to have to think it through a little more before you post it.
If it were that easy to avoid prosecution when breaking the law, then every criminal would incorporate and not worry anymore. It isn't hard to create a corporation, you know; anyone can do it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."