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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.
"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." While I question some of the treatment of research animals, what exactly did the chimps ask of the court?
What's next? A judgement against the internet on behalf of cats everywhere?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In other news, medical research slowly comes to a crashing halt in test phases. Millions of people die due to reactions which were not seen in simulations. Environmental moonbats everywhere cheer.
Om, nomnomnom...
Have we solved all human rights issues so we now moved on to grant animals personhood?
When it is possible to sit down with your lab "animal" and have a conversation in sign language...
Maybe they shouldn't be a lab animal.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
We don't even have this right for humans (sitting in Gitmo ) in this country, but they considering to grant monkeys this right? Unbelievable.
... before someone tries to marry a chimp?
The summary is wrong or at the very least highly misleading. What the judge did was allow the argument for chimp personhood to go forward. In other words the court did not find that chimps were unquestionably merely property. That's much weaker than deciding they are actual persons or legal persons. So yes there was a step forward for Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) but nowhere near as big a step as the summary implies.
The IRS will now show up and demand that they file their taxes.
The judicial action could force the university, which is believed to be holding the chimps, to release the primates
Release... Great idea - just tell me: how? Where?
Usually these animals are born in the lab and live in the lab until they die, or until they go to some kind of sanctuary or zoo. For obvious reasons they can't be released anywhere in the US - it's not where chimps naturally live. Even if released in natural chimp habitats, they'd die because they can't take care of themselves, or they may even get killed by the native chimps that don't like the intruders. They are simply fully dependent on their human caretakers, and need, even deserve, proper care to live out their lives peacefully.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
This is nothing more than a jobs program for lawyers. They get to make millions suing various pharmaceutical companies for years. In return, your drugs cost more, and are more likely to have unknown side-effects.
Precisely why are we stopping at recognizing chimps as people, except some sort of gross, obvious anthropocentrism?
Let's point out that there is an entire class of life forms on this planet that have ALSO gone through millions of years of evolution to reach where they are, and yet they are continually exploited, manipulated, and murdered on behalf of humans whims: that's right, I'm talking about plants.
There is no question that they live, breed, and grow. There is ample evidence that they feel pain, and even communicate with each other in ways that we barely understand. In many ways, they are far more in touch with their environment than we are, yet we chop vegetables up for food, we decapitate grass by the billions every week because they had the audacity to try to flourish, heck, we RIP THEM UP BY THEIR ROOTS and chemically sterilize them simply for living in the wrong place, dismissing it by calling them "weeds". We annihilate them, and even have the gall to use their corpses for DECORATION.
We are perpetuating a moral crime, yet nobody can be "bothered" because they don't have fur, a face, or make cute baby pictures.
#stopthehate
#lawnmowersaregenocide
#christmastreeisahatecrime
-Styopa
So can chimps now be arrested? Sued? Hold a job? Pay taxes? Get married? (Would it be ok if the chimps didn't do same sex marriage?) Hell, if they're legal persons, what's the age of consent for a chimp?
Either you define the rights and obligations which come from being a "legal person", or you are just making shit up as you go, and then you have a legal system based on nothing which can be interpreted.
Unless you clarify and codify a LOT of things as a result of this, what you have is a stupid decision which exists in a vacuum.
So if dogs suddenly became legal persons, would it be illegal to put stray dogs in the pound without a court hearing? Because, that's where we get with a habeus corpus ruling which applies to animals.
This is the end game for entities like PETA, where animals are legally recognized as "people" .. but PETA is full of people who wouldn't understand logic if it bit them in the ass, and opens a whole slew of problems which nobody has answers for.
Your honor, I submit that this cow, hereafter referred to as Bessie has not consented to be in a feed lot and would prefer to live in her natural environment. What's that? A modern cow has no natural environment because it only exists because we keep them?
Sorry, but this judge has either decided to open up a can of worms he hasn't even begun to understand, or he's an idiot who has been hoodwinked by a grandiose legal argument.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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...
Take your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape!
For the most part we don't use their whole corpse as decoration, just their genitals.
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.
So can chimps now be arrested? Sued? Hold a job? Pay taxes? Get married? (Would it be ok if the chimps didn't do same sex marriage?) Hell, if they're legal persons, what's the age of consent for a chimp?
Either you define the rights and obligations which come from being a "legal person", or you are just making shit up as you go, and then you have a legal system based on nothing which can be interpreted.
This is not really the case though. Our legal system has quite a bit in place already for handling those who are 'people' but do not have full rights and obligations. The biggest group would be children, who have a reduced set of rights and responsibilities, but still have personhood when it comes to legal protections and processes. This is also true for people with significant mental handicaps and people unable to communicate (such as being in a coma).
So we already have ample precedent for this type of legal status, and it already extends to humans who are less aware and intelligent than some animals, who are simply grandfathered in due to their parents having such rights.
There are plenty of humans who would volunteer for tests with full knowledge and understanding of the risks.
You are vastly overestimating the ability for even the average human to assess such risks, much less a significant majority of the population.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Dolphins are about as smart as pigs. The extra grey matter is sonar processing. Functional MRI has removed the mystery.
You'd think a place like /. would have put away this long dis-proven assertion. The guy that first asserted dolphins were as smart as people was on acid at the time and failed to teach them human language or to learn dolphin. Didn't matter how much acid he did, they still didn't talk.
Good gig if you're into that kind of thing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Chomsky is that you?
You know the answer is no. Even if language isn't wired into the brain (as it currently looks) human children develop language by observation and emulation.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
... is so common that Wikipedia has its own page dedicated to it.
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'
People mocked the idea that corporations are essentially people. And yet here we are, giving the same rights to chimps.