Posted on 12/02/2013 3:49:47 PM PST by lbryce
An animal rights group is taking to the courts in an effort to seek personhood for a chimpanzee. In a lawsuit filed today in Fulton County, New York, the Nonhuman Rights Project demands that "Tommy" — a privately owned chimp who lives on a reindeer farm in the state — be freed from his owners and moved to a sanctuary.
According to the group, they'll also file two additional lawsuits seeking sanctuary for chimps in other parts of the state. Those chimps are Kiko, living at a nonprofit center, and Hercules and Leo, being used for research at Stony Brook University. In all three instances, the group says, the animals are being held captive and, because of key cognitive capacities including the ability to make choices, have a limited right to freedom and cannot be held in captivity. "When we visited Tommy, we found him in a small cage at the back of a dark shed at a trailer sales park," a press release from the Nonhuman Rights Project reads. "Tommy was all by himself — his only company being a TV on a table on the opposite wall."
The lawsuits hinge on the use of habeas corpus, a strategy historically employed in cases of unlawful human confinement (slavery in particular). According to the group, led by legal academic and professor Steven Wise, one does not need to be human in order to merit certain rights — and as such, these chimpanzees are being illegally enslaved by their owners. "This petition asks this court to issue a writ recognizing that Tommy is not a legal thing to be possessed by respondents, but rather is a cognitively complex autonomous legal person with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned," reads the group's court filing, obtained by The New York Times.
The move marks a first in the US, but legal proceedings in other countries have sought — and sometimes obtained — certain rights for chimpanzees. Whether or not the case succeeds, it is bolstered by a growing body of scientific findings, which have concluded that chimpanzees boast complex cognitive abilities and profound emotional lives. And while this might be the most extreme effort to change how chimpanzees are perceived and treated, it's also one of several recent high-profile ventures in the same vein: the federal government earlier this year, for instance, announced plans to sharply limit the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research.
Now we finally get to see in absolute unqualified circumstances the irreversible damage that which started off in a small way, the championing of equality among those who could never be human, let alone equal, the utter destruction of society of laws of God and Man, these nihilistic misanthropes having undermined the very pillars of civilization have embarked on an new effort to exclaim, that we, too, are animals, for are not animals, persons, entitled to the rights and privileges of personhood? Never forget that we have reached the humongous moral abyss all of which began in a small,miniscule step, of those who said the very same of Sodomites, pedophiles and the whole stinking lot of sexual beasts and deviants, that they, too, are entitled to rights and privileges of personhood unequal among equals
And now look, see for yourself what, where this has ended up, where it has taken us. It's an absolute incontrovertible fact, the left-wing will never stop, the left win will never be satisfied, fulfilled until we, they utterly destroy us all.
A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy - PETA: because our philosophy is so attractive.
And yet they deny an unborn baby personhood.
That, absolutely, profoundly, says it all.
The up side would one more voter smarter than a Democrat.
A chimp is a person but a pre-born human being is not. Such strange logic.
If this lawsuit wins, I predict that the chimp will be registered to vote as a Democrat.
No, dolphins/whaless first, then elephants, and only after that the chimps.
Brain size matters.
I can’t figure out if PETA thinks we’re morally interchangeable with animals why they insist we DON’T eat them. If we’re morally just another animal, why wouldn’t we just be the best at it that we can be, just like the rest do? Does PETA run around trying to convince mountain lions not to eat rabbits? They’re such idiots they can’t even come up with a coherent philosophy.
Logic of libtards
Baby = not person
Chimp = person
that is a horrid cartoon of a lesbian...
I would bet the chimp would be a reliable democrat voter. But probably more intelligent than most of them.
If they can’t argue for themselves and throw a football, putting a perfect spiral on it, then they are not persons.
Cept the hot chimp from Planet of the Apes.
Classic Robert Heinlein story. Not sure whether “Jerry” was a chimp.
I think it’s the Disney influence.
On small step for monkeys,
One giant leap backward for mankind!
Beam me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life down here.
God help us.
Another reason for Demon-rats not to vote...brain size
And they need to not do other things.
Bran size.
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