Orangutan gets personhood status

[Catherine]

This is big news because it sets a legal precedent. Once you give one primate non human personhood status, you have given it to all of them. Even if this ruling is over turned, it is the first step in a long journey for rights for our intelligent cousins.

I can't get this link to work now so I will post some new links.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/1...uling.html

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/land...argentina/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/21...63582.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speak...argentina/
It is a Christmas gift for animals everywhere.

[LPC]

Indeed, a wonderful Christmas gift! I have bookmarked the page you mentioned and when I revise my site next time I will link to it. A great find. How do you discover all these interesting articles?!

[Catherine]

Oddly I can't remember where I came across this piece of news. I think it was on the radio or maybe my cell phone sent a link, that is more likely. It really is a smart phone. It seems to know what I am interested in hearing about in the way of news. It sends me links all the time. If the news is important I can follow it up on the computer.

Here is a background article from Wikipedia about the rights for apes movement. It give a bit of background on the subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_personhood

I don't think anyone is trying to get apes the right to vote or hold citizenship, but some basic personhood rights will protect them from being used in the lab and some of the other places they do not belong.

I don't know if anyone knows where this is going to end up, but we do need to do something to protect the great apes.

[Tobi]

This is good news indeed. None of us here need reminders that animals are 'non-human 'persons'. I think we all know that because of our own interactions with beings of other species.
But the 'world' needs its categories and labels in order to make legal distinctions I suppose, among other worldly things. And this will hopefully bring new attitudes towards species who don't speak in words. And hopefully begin to ensure they receive the understanding and respect they are entitled to, as well as protection....

[Catherine]

It is the beginning of change towards a new level of protection. It is like the first animal cruelty laws. They didn't do much, but they dared to say that it is not alright to be cruel to an animal. Now we have a ruling that says that an animal can have rights. Some places have just created laws to say that animals are not things like furniture and so they should be treated differently.

It is hopefully the beginning of a new era.

[LPC]

Since time immemorial we humans have thought of animals as "things", which can be used for food, clothing, sport, torturing for pleasure, scientific experiments, military research, etc. Let us hope that humankind is at last moving away from such a haughty "we're superior so we can do as we like" attitude. Even if we are intellectually superior to most animals, that brings with it not impunity to do as we like, but the obligation to care and protect.

I remember in 1969 when taking my preliminary degree exams (end of first year) that I answered a question on the ethics paper about the morality of heart transplants. Christiaan Barnard had recently done the world's first human heart transplant, so the topic was very recent. (I'm showing my age there, ha, ha!)

I answered that there were serious ethical problems with some aspects of transplants. Where a donor had given prior authorisation and had passed over, with the heart in a suitable condition to be transferred, I saw no objection. But I argued that such progress should not have been at the cost of the lives of 50 dogs used in the research (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard). I also questioned the ethics of proposals to use baboons or pigs as live donors (a baboon's heart was used in 1984 for a young child, who only survived 20 days). I queried the morality of killing healthy animals to extract organs for use in humans.

The result? I was called in to the practical ethics lecturer, who looked cross and upset. He said that the ethics issues affected only humans, not animals, and that the answer was therefore incorrectly focussed. He announced that he was going to mark that question very low indeed. He did add, somewhat sheepishly, that he would have a tough time justifying his marking to the professor of ethics, as all my theoretical ethics questions (which the professor himself had marked) were graded high.

Let us hope the world will soon take on the idea that animals have their own personhood and that we cannot do whatever we like with them.

[Tobi]

Well all I can say to that is I AM SO GLAD YOU SAID THAT, LPC!!
I even remember the days when it was debatable whether certain animals felt physical pain or not!

Intellectually superior?? Even that is debatable sometimes. I question those who ever heard a dog yelp or saw it put its tail under its belly, and a hundred and one other examples of obvious animal suffering at the hands of human stupidity, and then asked, "do animals feel pain?". I would call anyone who couldn't read those signals dunces indeed!

[Catherine]

I agree, there are issues with the whole idea of organ transplant. Too many animals suffered for the sake of research. Using a healthy animal heart at the cost of the animals life seems like too high a price to pay to gain a few days more. I don't even think organ transplant is the right direction to go. It requires a death before a heart becomes available and what it takes to prevent rejection is too extreme.

I know organ recipients and I would not want them to die, but research in other directions shows more promise in the long term.

I can see how you would have trouble in ethics class. Ethics/philosophy does not want to consider animals.
It is shocking how arrogant human thought has been. How could anyone doubt that animals feel pain.

I am hoping this recognition of personhood status for on orangutan will open doors for other animals in other circumstances.

[elajos]

I think it is very risky to mix the legal and biological system. I think we should look the animals as animals (even I know that we are also an animal species), and we should protect them as animals. The legal system can be applicable for human society only... I wrote about it in more detail here, if you were interested in it: http://www.zoomoments.com/index.php/cate...man-rights

[Tobi]

A warm welcome to the Forum elajos!

It is interesting to have a different viewpoint presented. And I respect that.

I feel that we can go down a bit of a misleading track when we anthropomorphise animals. They are not humans. They are very different to humans.

And yet I (for one) have had my own experiences which have broadened my previous viewpoint tremendously and those experiences have shown me they possess 'Consciousness' in their own right (although on a different plane of perception usually to the human consciousness levels.)

Therefore my own opinion is that -as possessors of 'consciousness' (feelings, emotions, thoughts, ability to experience love and pain etc) -then surely in this world, they have a right to some legal standing and/or support for their protection?

'Personhood' is an odd and perhaps not very apt phrase for what they are. I always thought so. But maybe that is the best word we can come up with at present...