Animal-rights activists never quit. The Nonhuman Rights Project, having lost cases seeking writs of habeas corpus for chimpanzees and an elephant named "Happy" in New York, has now brought a case in Colorado. It was properly tossed out of court at the trial-court level. Read More ›
Lately, as scientists unlock the complexity of plant biology, we are witnessing equivalent advocacy with regard to plants. The latest example of such radical anthropomorphizing comes to us in a long article just published in Aeon that discusses "plant philosophy." Read More ›
Periodically, the mainstream media focus on advocacy for the idea that plants are intelligent and/or moral beings. For example, the New York Times ran a column some years back asserting that peas are persons. Why? Pea plants release chemicals in the soil that alert other pea plants of drought conditions. Read More ›
The radicalism never stops. A post published by Oxford University Press — not a fringe publisher! — has advocated giving voting rights to animals. Read More ›
The chronic shortage of organs for transplantation has some bioethicists supporting unethical curatives, such as doing away with the dead-donor rule, allowing organ procurement to be not only paired with euthanasia — already being done in Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands — but also used as a means of euthanasia, and even allowing healthy people to consent to donating their vital organs. Read More ›
But eliminating suffering is impossible. Not only is the goal Utopian, but it leads to ever-more-extreme distortions of decency and a collapse of public policy rationality—which ironically, can cause the very “evil” that suffering abolitionists yearn so desperately to prevent. Read More ›
The nature-rights movement continues to move from the fringe into decidedly establishment circles, with virtually no push back and a foolish, “It will never happen here,” shrugging of the collective shoulders. Now, the U.K.’s Law Society — the organization that represents solicitors, roughly equivalent to the ABA — has issued a report calling for the establishment of nature and non-human rights. Read More ›
I have written here several times about the attempt by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NHRP) to “break the species barrier” by having animals declared “persons” entitled to enforceable rights. The first cases involved chimps. The latest attempt involved Happy the elephant, a denizen of the Bronx Zoo. Read More ›
Promoting the proper care of animals is a noble cause. But that is not what the legal effort to have Happy declared a ‘person’ is ultimately all about. Read More ›
