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Update: No Personhood for Chimps Yet
sciencehabit writes: In a decision that effectively recognizes chimpanzees as legal persons for the first time, a New York judge [Monday] granted a pair of Stony Brook University lab animals the right to have their day in court. The ruling marks the first time in U.S. history that an animal has been covered by a writ of habeus corpus, which typically allows human prisoners to challenge their detention. The judicial action could force the university, which is believed to be holding the chimps, to release the primates, and could sway additional judges to do the same with other research animals.
Update: 04/21 21:39 GMT by S : Science has updated their article with news that the court has released an amended order (PDF) with the words "writ of habeas corpus" removed, no longer implying that chimps have legal personhood. The order still allows the litigation to go forward, but we'll have to wait for resolution.
We don't even have this right for humans (sitting in Gitmo ) in this country, but they considering to grant monkeys this right? Unbelievable.
They are people being unlawfully detained so the fix is to send them to a sanctuary? Wouldn't that be like sending groups of humans to reservations? What's next? Smallpox bedding?
Obviously they can't be left to just roam the city. Maybe that's a clue that they are still animals...
*nod* that is the legal strategy they are following, treating chimps as 'people' but not people with the ability to exersize their legal rights, so like children or mentally impaired individuals.
WTF is the definition of legal person at this point?
Well, this is something we are constantly reexamining. Over the last century and a half we moved women, blacks, and children from the 'not person' to 'person' category, with children still holding restricted rights. As we learn more and more about brains, as a society we have to ask some rather difficult questions. Originally black people were not considered 'people' due to the belief their brains were more 'animal than man', which turned out to be BS. Today we are, bit by bit, discovering that quite a few animals are closer to us in awareness than we used to believe, often with more awareness than individual humans that are protected. Over the next century, the definition will probably continue to shift, though the final push, like so many cases of rights, will probably come from economic forces rather than ethical ones. As long as there is so much profit to be made, they will continue to be animals. When that fades away, people will magically decide that they were people all along and how horrible we were in the past for thinking otherwise.
Single feral children don't talk. But groups of children, held in isolation without any language contact, develop their own invented language.
The Catholics did it in the middle ages. Apparently they expected the kids to spontaneously start speaking Hebrew. Experiment couldn't be ethically repeated today.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'