http://www.wired.com/2014/10/chimpanzee-personhood-hearing/Quote
“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.”
Your thoughts, PaRD?
I think I'm on the side of Cassuto (and, by association, on the side of Bentham).
I also believe that putting a social animal (which a chimpanzee is) into confinement without companions of the same species is cruel. I think it can be positively proven that Tommy (and other chimps) suffer under these conditions. I think as moral agents we have a duty to reduce suffering where possible.
I'd like to post some Bentham here, if I may.
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?”