Argentine Court Rules Orangutan Is a "Non-Human Person"

First time accepted submitter Andrio writes In an unprecedented decision, an Argentine court has ruled that the Sumatran orangutan 'Sandra', who has spent 20 years at the zoo in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires, should be recognized as a person with a right to freedom. The ruling, signed by the judges unanimously, would see Sandra freed from captivity and transferred to a nature sanctuary in Brazil after a court recognized the primate as a "non-human person" which has some basic human rights. The Buenos Aires zoo has 10 working days to seek an appeal." A similar case involving chimpanzees failed to provide "non-human person" status here in the U.S. earlier this month.

Comments

An interesting point is

[azav]

That an orangutan will not try to eat you. Chimps can and will.

If these creatures get legal self identity, then are they also legally required to obey our laws?

In the US they picked the wrong chimp

[VernonNemitz]

Look up "Washoe". Being able to communicate, even if only by sign language, is important. The average chimp doesn't communicate much better than other ordinary animals, like dogs. And humans can fail to be communicative, look up "feral child". The point here is that humans are naturally prejudiced in favor of themselves, thinking that characteristics associated with personhood (like communicative-ness) are automatically/naturally associated with biological growth. But the fact is (at least here on Earth), communicative-ness at the person-class level is a result of Nurture, not Nature. As a result, if certain other organisms also receive appropriate Nurture (like Washoe did), then those organisms are as likely as a human to qualify for personhood. So now look up Koko the Gorilla and Chantek the Orangutan. Equally logically, any organisms that don't receive appropriate Nurture, including humans, are going to qualify more as ordinary animals than as persons. (The default Natural condition, per biological development only, for a human is to be just a clever animal.)

But an unborn baby is not a person. Riiiiiight...

[PseudoCoder]

Wondering; what are these "basic human rights" that actual human babies are denied at the rate of 50 million a year?

Take for example the right to freedom. Nobody has to take care of the orangutan for it to exercise this right. But for a baby to exercise its right to freedom, it has to be nurtured for around 18 years or so, and that's much too inconvenient. It takes work and selfless sacrifice, both of which suck. (Speaking as a parent of one, and another on the way)

So how exactly does this make us more compassionate people? When we're willing to free a monkey because it's easy, and prefer to to stop a human heart because keeping it alive is harder?