Animals Are Persons Too

New York Times ^ | April 23, 2014 | Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker

[don-o]

How does a thing become a person? In December 2013, the lawyer Steven Wise showed the world how, with a little legal jujitsu, an animal can transition from a thing without rights to a person with legal protections. This Op-Doc video follows Mr. Wise on his path to filing the first-ever lawsuits in the United States demanding limited “personhood” rights for certain animals, on behalf of four captive chimpanzees in New York State. Continue reading the main story Related in Opinion

Dot Earth Blog: A Closer Look at ‘Nonhuman Personhood’ and Animal WelfareJULY 28, 2013

Mr. Wise (who is also the subject of The New York Times Magazine’s cover story this Sunday) has spent more than 30 years developing his strategy for attaining animal personhood rights. After he started his career as a criminal defense lawyer, he was inspired by Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation” to dedicate himself to justice for animals. He helped pioneer the study of animal rights law in the 1980s. In 2000, he became the first person to teach the subject at Harvard Law School, as a visiting lecturer. Mr. Wise began developing his animal personhood strategy after struggling with ineffective welfare laws and regulations that fail to keep animals out of abusive environments. Unlike welfare statutes, legal personhood would give some animals irrevocable protections that recognize their critical needs to live in the wild and to not be owned or abused. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage

Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?APRIL 23, 2014

The current focus of Mr. Wise’s legal campaign includes chimpanzees, elephants, whales and dolphins — animals whose unusually high level of intelligence has been recognized by scientific research.

[S.O.S121.500]

WE ?

[The_Media_never_lie]

Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?APRIL 23, 2014

My chimp dislikes shyster lawyers, and would probably try to bite one who suggested he should sue.

[Cboldt]

Animals are logical, smart, can be “guilted”, etc. I think what they lack is introspection.

[GOPJ]

Other Worlds of Isaac Asimov - It’s kindle time...

http://www.asimovreviews.net/Stories/Story135.html

Thanks for the link Civ

[Long Jon No Silver]

Animal liberationists are not unlike the Nazis. Any movement that sets out to treat animals as humans will inevitably result in humans being treated like animals. Hence Nazis could feel good about outlawing the docking of sheeps tails and yet brand humans, ship them around in cattle cars and kill them with less thought for their suffering than they would for a cow killed for meat. It’s ironic that Jews are very prominent in A.L movement.

[Texas Songwriter]

I see no evidence that animals use the laws of logic.

[Cboldt]

Fine by me. I was just trying to be helpful.

[familyop]

Some subscribers here have argued long and hard to say that animals are people and have rights like those of humans. They've also tried gradualism, for example, in saying that it is proper to describe animals with the relative pronoun, who, instead of that. To make matters worse, university linguistic activists have been trying to rule that error into our language.

This is one of the consequences. Enjoying those meat prices?

[SpaceBar]

I try not to read too much into it. If old Adolf got one right, then what the hey.

[SpaceBar]

I see no evidence that animals use the laws of logic.

I interact with domesticated rats. They are supremely logical animals. Pound for pound the smartest animals.

[SpaceBar]

But rats won’t come up with differential calculus anytime soon, lovable as they are.

[MHGinTN]

Perhaps, but let’s look at the bigger picture. ALL living things have some aspect of consciousness. The greater complexity we humans exhibit is due to our intricate brain making possible the fabrication of holographic meaning to the data we receive from events that have already happened. There is a gorilla who uses sign language on a primitive level, but she knows she is communicating so the use of language indicates use of syntax ... a form of logic.

[SpaceBar]

Modern science has never clearly defined the life force.

[hinckley buzzard]

Personhood is a legal term not a scientific one. A "person" is who or what the law says he/she/it is. We have a large population of human beings who cannot use reason or logic, Ranging from young children to insane people to adults with dementia but who are persons, with all the due process protections the constitution provides.

[SpaceBar]

Person... something that can be sued for damages.

[MHGinTN]

In my big ToE (Theory of Everything) there is a dimension as real as dimension space or dimension time from which life force/consciousness is sourced. There is also a dimension of spirit. Consciousness inveigles space and time to exhibit living beings/things. Without time events do not occur and without space things do not exist, in the terms of how we define reality. There are at least three variable expressions of each dimension, and maybe more.

[SpaceBar]

I believe the quantum mechanical electrical properties existing within proteins and lipid layers enable hyper light communication within living systems. The ability to “anticipate” thermodynamics through hyperlighspeed micro communication within molecular systems is what we call life.

[MHGinTN]

You would enjoy a paper by Bernard Haisch, et al, published in Physics in 2005. He and a guy named Rueda, along with some input from Hal Puthoff have derived F = ma showing that wave function of the quantum vacuum, the zero point field, is the source of inertia and gravity. I don’t have the addy at my finger tips but it is googleable using Haisch Zero Point Field. You’ll want to read the 2005 paper for it’s more simple mathematical tightness. I want to get them to go one step further, to look at the zero point field as causing inertia because of pointing vector of time in every ‘parton’. I’m convinced that dimension Time is not what we have been thinking it is, as some background state. It has variable expressions, such as linear, planar, and volumetric.

[Texas Songwriter]

I view personhood as something more than a legal definition. Legal definitions change, and sometimes with it, the declared nature of the person. To be a person is to is to be a proper subject of absolute regard. If we accept the Biblical revelation that man is the imago Dei, the image of God, then every human being is a person, by nature a thing different from any other, a begin whose very existence is a kind of sacrament. Trying to understand man without recognizing him as the imago Dei is to miss the point of personhood. Without an explanation, we may try to hold fast to our knowledge of the evil of murdering my neighbor. If we fail to understand the imago Dei and adhere to the contemporary secular ethics, the ruling tendency is to concede that there are such things as persons, but to define them in terms of their functions or capacities-not to define them in terms of the image of God, but what they can do. Ethicists of today often define "personhood" as the capacity to communicate and conceptual self-awareness. If you can't, then you are not a person. This then opens up a panoplea of what the keepers of the culture will decide dependent upon the vissitudes of the moment. By contrast if we are a person by nature, then I am a rights bearer, by nature-not because of what I can do but because of what I am. In short, a person is by nature someone whom it is wrong to view merely functionally an therefore wrong to value merely as a means to the ends or the interests of others. If I am a person because others regard me as a person only because I am able to exercise certain capacities that interest you, that opinion can change with the appointment of a single supreme court justice, a man. Germans referred to this as lebensunwerten Leben, life, unworthy of life.

The foundational principles behind this, is that we make up moral principles. They are not laws like mathematics, but a derivative of of culture, sort of like the current style of architecture. Without the common moral ground applicable to all persons we are left to the vasile thoughts of men. Disbelief in common moral ground is rapidly becoming a pillar of middle-class prejudice. How often have we heard 'I will not allow you to impose your morality on anyone else'. We see it every day with law suits by atheists to disallow Christians in the military from having access to a Bible.

I think we are not so far apart in the question before us. My problem is that due process, today, seems to be arbitrarily applied.

To quote Forrest Gump, "I'm kinda tired now, I think I'll go home."

[Organic Panic]

My dog is offended to be considered beneath subhuman scum that are progressives. Hevk, he thinks he’s more people than people.