We can protect animals from wrongful treatment without wrongfully redefining animals as legal persons ‘who’ are morally equivalent to humans.
Over the past decade or so, the Nonhuman Rights Project has sought to obtain legal personhood for chimpanzees and elephants. The method to their madness is to seek writs of habeas corpus to release the animals from various means of confinement.
The group has failed so far. But it keeps gaining ground that should never have been lost. One high court judge in New York would have granted personhood and rights to chimps, and later, two judges in that court would have done so for elephants. Meanwhile, this fall the Hawaiian Supreme Court will review yet another elephant writ of habeas corpus case brought by the organization. Frankly, I fear the worst.
Michigan has seen similar habeas litigation involving chimps where the NhRP lost in the trial and appeals courts. The case involved seven chimps kept at a roadside zoo in apparently inappropriate circumstances from an animal-welfare perspective. As animal rights activists always do, the NhRP analogized the denial of rights to chimps to the oppression once imposed upon women and to slavery. The Court of Appeals judges weren’t buying. From the unanimously decided, Nonhuman Rights Project v. DeYoung Family Zoo (citations omitted):
Plaintiff’s analogies to habeas proceedings involving women or enslaved persons do not alter this landscape. Plaintiff cites no authority suggesting that women were not “persons” at common law. The slavery analogy cuts the other way: The atrocity of slavery was that the law permitted persons to be treated as property. Blackstone observed that the origins of slavery were “built upon false foundations” and that “the law of England abhors, and will not endure the existence of, slavery within this nation.” Those episodes reflect failures to honor human personhood, not expansions of it beyond the human species.
Bingo.
The appellate judges also noted that only natural persons are entitled to habeas corpus relief and stated the obvious; that only humans are capable of understanding and undertaking duties:
A central aspect of personhood is mankind’s capacity to “give[] up a part of his natural liberty” and oblige [ ] himself to conform to those laws, which the community has thought proper to establish.” Chimpanzees—and nonhuman animals generally—are incapable of making this exchange. “Unlike the human species, which has the capacity to accept social responsibilities and legal duties, nonhuman animals cannot—neither individually nor collectively—be held legally accountable or required to fulfill obligations imposed by law.”…We see no reason to question the uniform authority that animals are not persons who are eligible for a writ of habeas corpus.
The Michigan Supreme Court just refused to review that decision. That’s good. But in dissent, Justice Elizabeth M. Welch bought the argument that the treatment of animals can be judged as if humans were treated in the same way, writing that chimpanzee “subjugation” is the “very same concept that was used by the federal government to justify the conquest of Native American nations.”
Oh, please. As I have repeatedly argued when discussing this issue, oppressing fellow humans is a profound moral wrong because it treats inherent equals unequally. Animal husbandry — in which humans treat inherent unequals unequally — is not the same thing at all. Indeed, claiming otherwise is, in my view, profoundly misanthropic.
Justice Welch clearly favors animal personhood — and therefore would allow at least some animals to eligible for writs of habeas corpus:
Plaintiff and amici present considerable evidence that chimpanzees can think, feel, love, grieve, and yearn. In light of that evidence, “[e]fforts to extend legal rights to chimpanzees are . . . understandable[.]” Someday, the effort to extend rights to chimpanzees may succeed. Human history has seen various examples of human beings expanding their circle of moral concern.
But here’s a rich irony. In the very last sentence of her dissent, Justice Welch shows how this “animals are persons too” sophistry is totally unnecessary to protect chimps (and other animals) from abuse:
Although this Court denies leave today, our Legislature can always reconsider its animal welfare laws—including the laws concerning the confinement of chimpanzees.
Exactly! Animal welfare laws can adequately remedy animal mistreatment and if new laws are needed, by all means, I hope the legislature gets to it. We can protect animals from wrongful treatment without turning society inside out by wrongfully redefining animals as legal persons “who” are morally equivalent to humans.
One last point. This ongoing writ of habeas corpus strategy is ultimately as nonsensical as it is subversive to human exceptionalism. The Great Writ, as it is known, frees the person who receives it. But if the NhRP had won the case, the animals’ custody would simply have been transferred to different humans who intended to put them in a chimp sanctuary. That would probably be more appropriate from an animal welfare perspective, but the chimps would still be confined in a place not of their choosing. They would still be completely under human control. They would be anything but free.