Matthew Hiasl Pan is the name given to him. Nice name except for one major detail. Pan is a 26 year old Chimpanzee. And in the radical animal rights activists mind Pan should be seen as, treated as and protected in law as a person.
Thankfully the high court in Austria decided that only people get people status. Duh! The only agreement with the animal rights activists is that Pan is not a human. But the claim is, if you get to know Pan, you will realize that he is a person.
Not happy with the Austrian decision, they've taken their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.
Wesley has said, "giving constitutional rights to animals and plants will open Pandora's Box.
Chimp personhood is a primary goal that animal-right activists seek to attain and then use as a wrecking ball to disintegrate human exceptionalism." Smith also said "Once a court declares a chimpanzee to be a full person, that ruling would make chimps, in at least some regards, our legal equals. And when it happens, it will be a moral earthquake that will harm humankind profoundly."
1 comment:
Just because something (or someone) is not a human, that doesn't mean they are not a person.
Fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy fiction, is full of non-humans who are also persons. Because they would act more human than a chimpanzee does, their personhood is obvious. And if those elves, aliens or robots really existed, I'd sure expect that we'd treat them like persons. They would be self-conscious creatures who want to live, just like any human being.
A species designation does nothing to inform us of personhood, just as race designations in the past were wrongly used for the same purpose. There is no justification for excluding the possibility of non-human persons.
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