Subjective Objectivism

Chimps and Humans… Close but No Cigar.

I ran into an interesting article a couple of days ago that kinda left me scratching my head:

 Animal rights activists campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria’s Supreme Court after a lower court threw out their latest appeal.

A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case earlier this week, ruling that the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories had no legal standing to argue on the chimp’s behalf.

OK am I missing something? Look I love animals, and I am all about protecting animals, but how did we get from protecting animals to giving them human rights? Chimpanzees are not people. They are Chimpanzees. No amount of legal wrangling will change that fact.

You can give the chimp a name and dress it up in a monkey suit and it will still be a chimp. Yes, they have needs and they have interests, but, by definition they are not human interests, and I’m quite certain that their legal status is not one of them. Neither is being human. Chimps just want to be chimps.

 ”It is astounding how all the courts try to evade the question of personhood of a chimp as much as they can,” Balluch said. – [Yahoo/AP]

Avoiding the issue of chimp personhood?!?! Issue? What issue? There is no issue dagnabbit, they are freakin’ CHIMPANZEES, not PEOPLE!! Sheesh!! This whole thing makes no sense to me. If these people want to help out these poor chimpanzees so bad, why not buy out the shelter? Or set up a new one just for the chimps? Or just buy the chimps outright?

If they are so darn worried that they may get sold to someone outside Australia, then someone needs to pony up the cash and buy them before that happens. These chimpanzees can’t exactly get a job. After all (in case I haven’t been clear enough on this), they are chimps, not humans. And someones got to pay for the food on the table…

Court won’t declare chimp a person – [Yahoo/AP]

Tags: Animal, ASPCA, Australia, Bad Ideas, Chimpanzee, Citizenship, Issues