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“Chimpanzees are autonomous, self-determining beings. Why shouldn’t they be legal persons?” attorney Steven Wise, founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, said to WIRED last week. “How is it that we can ignore the autonomy of a nonhuman, while making [autonomy] to be a supreme value of a human being?”

In December, Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project filed so-called writs of habeas corpus—requests that a judge consider whether a person is being wrongfully imprisoned—on behalf of Tommy and, in separate cases, three other chimpanzees. Their briefs referenced several centuries of judicial precedents attesting to the importance of autonomy to legal definitions of personhood.

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Justice Elizabeth Garry asked whether the lawsuit was, at its heart, about promoting Tommy’s well-being. That line of questioning, said animal law attorney Kevin Schneider in an interview after the hearing, was a sort of legal trap: It would have moved the lawsuit away from personhood and onto grounds of animal cruelty.

“This is not a welfare issue,” argued Wise, who says existing animal welfare statutes permit Tommy to be kept alone in a cage. “The question is whether there is an unlawful detention here.” To which Peters rejoined: What is unlawful about the detention?

If Tommy is a legal person, said Wise, then keeping a person in solitary confinement in a cage is unlawful detention. But Peters noted that if a writ of habeas corpus is indeed granted, Tommy will not actually go free. Rather, he’ll be moved to a chimpanzee sanctuary: from one cage, then, to a larger one. “How do we define cage?” she asked.

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David Cassuto, an animal law scholar at Pace University, struck a similar note. Though he supports the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts, and thinks their arguments have “significant potential,” he said that judges are simply reluctant to transform laws in such profound ways.

Cassuto’s preferred strategy is to pressure lawmakers to improve animal cruelty statutes, which are largely toothless and poorly enforced. Many animal advocates, he said, are also not convinced that autonomy is the basis of our ethical obligations to animals. “Is autonomy the legal basis for humane treatment?” Cassuto asked. “I’d say no. I’d say it’s sentience and the ability to suffer.”

Quote (Jeremy Bentham)

“The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Quote (Caedus @ 14 Oct 2014 00:45)

Slippery slope. Do we thus have to give dolphins and Corvids "person" status as well?

Quote (duffman316 @ 14 Oct 2014 00:50)

what will we conduct scientific experiments on if we classify them as persons?

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An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable.

Quote (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/04/singer)

According to an account of the documentary in The Times of London, which Singer has not disputed, Singer is shown in an exchange with Tipu Aziz, an Oxford neurosurgeon who has developed new treatments for Parkinson's disease, in part by giving Parkinson's to non-human primates for experiments. Aziz tells Singer that about 40,000 people have probably been helped by the research, and that about 100 monkeys were used to develop the treatment.

Singer then tells Aziz: "Well, I think if you put a case like that, clearly I would have to agree that was a justifiable experiment." Singer then goes on to say that as long as "there was no other way of discovering this knowledge," he could "see that as justifiable research."

Given the absolutist views of many animal rights activists -- namely that it is impossible to justify experiments with animals -- the quotes immediately had people talking about whether Singer had changed his views. The reaction from some animal rights groups has been swift.

A British animal rights group that has been fighting Aziz and his research published an update denying that Singer had ever been a leading figure in the movement (it might want to check PETA's Web site to verify that Singer has been considered its hero). The British Web site, Arkangel for Animal Liberation, published the following: "Peter Singer seems to have fallen foul of the lies propagated by the vivisectionists and many in the animal rights movement are now expressing their disgust," adding that "the man talks rubbish and the sooner the notion that he has any place in the modern animal rights movement is dispelled the better."

Singer, reached by e-mail, sent two letters that he has sent to British publications that have written about his statements in the documentary. In the letters, he states that it is incorrect to view his quotes in the documentary as representing a change in his position. He writes that he has never said "that no experiments on animals could ever be justified," and goes on to explain: "My position has always been that whether an act is right or wrong depends on its consequences. I do insist, however, that the interests of animals count among those consequences, and that we cannot justify speciesism, which I define as giving less weight to the interests of nonhuman animals than we give to the similar interests of human beings."

Quote (hATemOnkEy @ Oct 13 2014 05:56pm)

Singer makes some interesting points on this matter. You may know him as the author of (among other books) Animal Liberation.

Quote (IceMage @ 14 Oct 2014 00:52)

Human beings have dominion over animals.  It's nice to think that some animal suffering matters, but on the grand scale, it's really just humans trying to extend our moral nature to other sentient beings.  Animals suffer and die every day.  I think laws against animal abuse are a good thing, but personhood for any animal, no matter how intelligent, just seems silly to me. 

Let's be honest, not many of us would feel good going to a slaughterhouse, but we still buy meat at the grocery store.  Our distance from the food we consume(without killing it ourselves) has made us out of touch with the natural order of the food chain.