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Chimpanzee "Personhood" Lawsuits Fail In New York Courts
sciencehabit writes "Three lawsuits filed last week that attempted to achieve 'legal personhood' for four chimpanzees living in New York have been struck down. The suits, brought by the animal rights group the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), targeted two chimps on private property and two in a research lab at Stony Brook University in New York. NhRP says it will now appeal each lawsuit to a higher court, and that it will continue its campaign to grant chimpanzees, dolphins, and other cognitively advanced animals legal personhood nationwide."
From my understanding, the lawyers were hoping to create a legal fiction such that habeas corpus would be applicable to the chimpanzees, similar to the way that personhood is granted to corporations for many different purposes. A corporation needs to be a "person" so it can be sued. But corporate personhood does not grant corporations every right that people have. The same thing is happening here. No one wants to give chimpanzees the right to vote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction#Corporate_personhood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
Chimps are not bonobos.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
You might want to learn a bit about chimpanzees.
They "have the ability to plan, use tools, and effectively modify our environment."
They go on murder parties to other chimp groups. They strip out all natural resources that they can access in an area (food). They can actually communicate, not just mimic.
Also, "by definition if you are not human you are an animal" you might want to go look up the biological definition of Homo sapiens. We're animals too.
And "humans are responsible for their actions. Humans that are not, we lock up." Chimps behave in similar ways by shunning, punishing or even killing those chimps that don't conform to group behaviors.
So maybe you need new definitions, and obviously knowledge, of the differences between humans & chimps.
1 US Corporations
2 Foreign Corporations
3 People in my country
4 People in other countries
5 People in other countries who look like they have nothing
6 Cute animals
7 Monkeys that aren't so cute
8 People in countries the US government doesn't like
9 non-cute things that can't harm me
10 scary things
FTFY
Time to offend someone
Sure, deer can outsprint humans, to the point where the human loses track of the deer, but nothing outruns a human over long distances. There was an article in Runner's World back in the 70s about running down deer in the Pacific Northwest. It takes about 4 hours.
The Tarahumara Indians of Mexico are famous for hunting deer precisely this way. Tarahumara have been known to run distances up to 200 miles without rest.
Humans aren't wimps; we're just specialized.
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