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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.
It's official:
Monkeys now have more rights than 21st century American citizens.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Argentina has truly earned the title "Banana Republic".
Deporting her to a country she has never been in seems a strange thing to do. Don't people complain when you do that to human people - deporting people who have only ever lived in whatever country their parent illegally migrated to. Heck it's not even the "native" country of the species in question...
So surely just set her free into the streets of whatever city the zoo is in.
Oh, I don't think that's a good idea. Do you have any idea how hard it is to even *get* monkeys to use mouthwash?
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?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
What suffering? If it's a modern zoo then they were doing everything they could to make this animal feel as comfortable as possible. The lack of gawkers might be a bit of an improvement. However, the do-gooders really only traded one guilded cage for another one.
The creature in question has no real legal rights or self-determination in either case.
This creature has just had one master traded for another. Beyond the sensationalist headline, this situation is really indistinguishable from a sales transaction.
This ape is still being treated as someone's property. Except it's now some class of person. Great precedent there.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How we treat animals, children, and people "weaker" than ourselves says a lot more about *our* humanity than theirs.Â
Please do enlighten us about the humanity of animals.
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.)
Of course we can!
Possibility the First: God exists, and gave Man dominion over the Earth and everything in it. Check, we can do what we like.
Possibility the Second: God doesn't exist, we're just another animal. Therefore we can do what we like to the lesser animals, because, after all, we're just another Top-of-the-Food-Chain predator, eh?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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?
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
So it's a corporation?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
No, the reason you can't do this to other humans is because that would work extremely bad in a civilization. You simply have to have some rules - like not murdering each other, not selling each other as slaves etc. Or the society would break down.
Because when a fetus is in a women's body it is part of her body. And she can do what she wants to her body. End of story.
These are two completely different subjects and you're really reaching here to tie this into abortion law.
Most zoos nowadays (at least the ones I've visited) don't have the animals just sitting in metal cages for people to gawk at. The animals have mini-habitats to roam through, have appropriate items to play with, and food to eat. They have medical care (sometimes better than humans get). Yes, they don't have the freedom to roam that animals in the wild have, but they trade that off for freedom from predators.
Besides, zoos often help support efforts to conserve species and people like protecting animals they've seen. If you see a rhino and then hear there are only a thousand left because they are being hunted for their horns, you might kick in some dollars to a conservation effort. If the zoo simply had a poster of a rhino, you wouldn't be likely to donate anything at all.
As to whether I'd like to live my life how zoo animals live theirs? I'm not sure. I'm not going to pretend that zoo-life is completely idyllic, but it also isn't horribly abusive anymore. (At least not in modern zoos. If there's an "old timey animals in metal cage" sort of zoo, get the animals out of there now.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.