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| Chimpanzee (Photo by Thomas Lersch) |
The Declaration of Independence, that widely-hailed champion of individual rights, has one fatal flaw:
It only pertains to humans.
If it were to also read, "When in the course of animal events," that could be a horse of a different color. This very matter is currently being explored by a U.S. animal rights group that has filed a lawsuit calling for the "legal personhood" of chimpanzees.
According to Bernard Vaughan and Daniel Weissner of Reuters, the Nonhuman Rights Project requested that a New York State court declare a chimp named Tommy (who is caged at a used trailer lot in Central New York) to be "a cognitively complex autonomous legal person with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned."
This same lawsuit lobbies for the rights of three other "imprisoned" New York chimps: one at a private property in Niagara Falls, and two within research facilities at SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island.
Chimps have long been known to be intelligent and social animals. James B. Harrod takes this a step further by theorizing that chimps also exhibit religious-type behaviors.
In light of these qualities, perhaps it is long past time to treat chimps as fellow travelers rather than as slaves.
Resources
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/03/21742085-new-york-lawsuit-seeks-legal-personhood-for-chimpanzee
Copyright December 5, 2013 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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