Animal Rights — a "Non-Human Person"

Animal rights extremists have won a strange victory from a court that seems to be one saddle shy of a posse. An orangutan was ruled a "non-human person". Definitions are important, especially over concepts (such as evolution) that have multiple meanings. But person? (Ironically, the word "orangutan" comes from the Malay language, and roughly translates as "person of the forest"). How can an ape be rationally defined as a person at all? This nonsense is an extension of environmental extremism.

Credit: morgueFile / bekkli

Extreme environmentalism and giving rights to animals (sometimes trying to give them more rights than humans have, especially unborn humans!) is based on a faulty view of origins from evolutionary thinking. Biblical creationists know that people are unique, created in God's image. Darwinistas need to believe we're all essentially the same because we all evolved from a common ancestor and humans got the luck of the draw. I reckon that anybody with a grain of sense can see that humans are unique.

An Argentine court made history when it granted an orangutan, ‘Sandra’, some legal rights that have traditionally been reserved for humans. The BBC reports:

Lawyers for Argentina’s Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (Afada) said Sandra was “a person” in the philosophical, not biological, sense. She was, they argued, in a situation of illegal deprivation of freedom as a “non-human person”.

The BBC did not include a comment from Sandra expressing her thoughts about her newfound rights.

To finish reading, swing on over to 'Should animals be given "human rights?'"