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from the Better-the-Chimp-than-Corporations dept.
From the article, paraphrased:
When Steven Wise, a 63-year-old legal scholar in the field of animal law, decided to poke around Circle L Trailer Sales to assess the living conditions of the Reindeer living on the company grounds, he was horrified to discover that a former circus chimpanzee named Tommy was forced to live in inhumane conditions:
A rancid milk-musk odor wafted forth and with it the sight of an adult chimpanzee, crouched inside a small steel-mesh cell. Some plastic toys and bits of soiled bedding were strewn behind him. The only visible light emanated from a small portable TV on a stand outside his bars, tuned to what appeared to be a nature show.
Being sufficiently moved by witnessing that heinous crime, Wise and a few cohorts strolled into the Fulton County Courthouse wielding a legal document the likes of which had never been seen in any of the world's courts, a legal package including a detailed account of the "petitioner's" cruel and unusual solitary confinement along with nine affidavits gathered from leading primatologists, underscoring the physical and psychological damages such living conditions endured by a being with such cognitive capability. Tommy would not, however, have anticipated that he was about to make legal history as the first nonhuman primate to ever sue a human captor in an attempt to gain his own freedom.
Granting rights associated with personhood to non-persons has been discussed extensively before, but would be giving personhood to animals be a dangerous slippery-slope? Would be the mark of a more humane and mature society?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 28 2014, @07:27PM
This is beginning to sound like an anti-cubicle rant, but its actually better than open plan, which is like some kind of dog fighting pit, but less humane.
This vaguely resembles my first "real" job in the 90s, back when they treated us better and we all got cubicles.
"A rancid milk-musk odor wafted forth and with it the sight of an adult (perl coder), crouched inside a small (cloth)-mesh cell. Some plastic toys and bits of soiled bedding were strewn behind him. The only visible light emanated from a small (CRT monitor) on a stand outside his bars, tuned to what appeared to be (screensaver)."
You have to consider, if the kind of dirtbag who would put a fellow human being in an open plan were put in charge of animals, what kind of horrors would be unleashed on those poor dumb beasts? Probably look like a slaughterhouse or a dog fighting pit. No, I think a cage is, unfortunately, superior, given the type of "superiors" we're dealing with here.
Take away the cages and the inmates dream they're being sent to a Hedonism resort, but what they actually get is ...