“I have been warning you and warning you: It takes just one judge, wanting to make history, to kick the props out from under our tottering societal embrace of human exceptionalism. In Argentina--next door to Brazil, where a judge was previously poised to grant a writ of habeas corpus to a chimp, when the animal died--a court has declared an orangutan a ‘person.’ From the Reuters story: ‘An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognized the ape as a “non-human person” unlawfully deprived of its freedom, local media reported on Sunday.’ ... One hopes this will be overturned on appeal. If it isn't, some will simply shrug. Others will laugh and roll their eyes. But indifference is the enemy of maintaining a righteous society and there is nothing funny about erasing human exceptionalism. ‘Breaking the species barrier,’ as Peter Singer put it in The Great Ape Project, will have a calamitous impact on human self-regard, and eventually, freedom. The animal rights agenda--completely unnecessary to protect animal welfare--won’t elevate animals to the level of humans, but will reduce us to the value of animals. And that means that the weakest and most vulnerable--the disparaged and the outcast--will eventually lose their inherent protections based simply on being human. I don’t have time here to make the argument again: It took an entire book to engage in my A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy.” “Court Declares,” Wesley J. Smith, Dec. 21, 2014, evolutionnews.org Comments are closed.
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