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posted by LaminatorX on Monday April 28 2014, @02:37PM   Printer-friendly
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?

 
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  • (Score: 1) by broken on Tuesday April 29 2014, @08:03AM

    by broken (4018) on Tuesday April 29 2014, @08:03AM (#37557) Journal

    After reading the article (OK, it's rather long so I just skimmed a lot), it seems that Wise's interest isn't interested so much in helping this individual case as he is in establishing a legal precedent that can help more animals in the future. Apparently he thinks this a promising case to bring to help create that precedent.

    I don't expect the courts to be at all sympathetic to his approach, even if they would be likely to rule against the defendant on animal cruelty grounds. But that ambivalence is probably exactly what he's hoping to use to squeeze out the most favorable ruling possible on the issue legal personhood of animals.