Hawaii

Here we go again. Several years ago, the radical Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) sued in New York to have chimps declared “persons.” The case lost in the trial court and, ultimately, the court of appeals (the highest court in the state) refused to review it.

But one high-court judge took the time to issue a concurring opinion (citing an animal-rights-promoting book) opining that while review would have been wrong, whether chimps should be proper subjects for a writ of habeas corpus is appropriate, in part because denying the right is “based on nothing more than the premise that a chimpanzee is not a member of the human species.”

Next, the NhRP brought a lawsuit in New York to have a (now deceased) elephant named Happy, which (not who!) had resided at the Bronx Zoo for decades, declared a person. The lawsuit lost but did better. Not only did the court of appeals hear the case, but two — count ’em, two — judges out of seven said that Happy should be declared a person with rights and, moreover, ludicrously compared the differing treatment between animals and humans with the discriminatory laws that once allowed slavery and denied equality to women.