Activist challenges judges to redefine chimpanzees’ legal status

Creation Ministries International ^ | 4-15-14 | Warren Nunn

[fishtank]

Activist challenges judges to redefine chimpanzees’ legal status: Animal rights lawyer Steven Wise courts controversy

by Warren Nunn

Published: 15 April 2014 (GMT+10)

If Steven Wise has his way, chimps will have quasi-human rights.

Lawsuits on behalf of captive chimpanzees in America could be a turning point in how the judiciary adjudicates on animal rights.

A group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project filed lawsuits on behalf of the chimps claiming they were ‘nonhuman animals’ that had a right to live free from confinement and not be regarded as property but as ‘legal persons’.1

The organisation’s website summarized the move:

“These habeas corpus2 writs are a way of going before the court to argue that our chimpanzee plaintiffs are legal persons with the fundamental right to bodily liberty, based on their level of complex cognition, self-awareness and autonomy, rather than simply pieces of property that can be owned, imprisoned and used for experiments.”3 The movement is headed by founder and lawyer Steven Wise, who cites evolutionary philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation as a light-bulb moment in his decision to pursue the animal rights cause.

It has been his life’s work to build a case and argue before a judge that an animal is a legal entity with rights and therefore should be freed of such discrimination as being kept in a cage.

(more at link)

[SandRat]

lawsuits on behalf of the chimps claiming they were ‘nonhuman animals’

Now that's an Oxymoron.

[TurboZamboni]

WHen’s the last time a 4 year old ate a women’s face off?

[alloysteel]

Question: Does a four and a half year old child vote, or drive an automobile, or write letters to his grandmother?

There is a reason chimpanzees, or any other of the great apes, are not accepted into polite human society. They have the mental endowment, when mature, of perhaps a very low-level idiot, and lack even the linguistic capabilities of the human child, whether they have opposable thumbs or not.

But they are very good at being chimpanzees or other great apes, and for this, they have been fitted well. A high degree of balance and natural gymnastic capabilities, and tremendous upper-body strength, make adaptation to living in trees or descent to the ground and ranging in troop over a territory no great stretch for these specimens, and they do have highly developed social structures (a learned behavior, but unique to each species of apes and not at all compatible with human society).

[beelzepug]

“WHen’s the last time a 4 year old ate a women’s face off?”

I have an eleven-month-old grandson who tries to do that to me.

[Captain Compassion]

Adult male Chimps average 5'6” and 150 pounds. They are extremely strong and aggressive. Perhaps the author should spend some time in a closed room with a couple of wild males. As you say he my well change his mind.

CC

[Inwoodian]

Harry Speakup.

[Old Yeller]

His boy is a chimp off the ol block.