Animals aren't people, too

In a Manhattan courtroom in late May, lawyers argued their clients had been unlawfully detained. They wanted the court to grant them relief. But in this case, the clients were chimpanzees, and their so-called detention would usually be called, in the field of zoology, captivity.

The lawyers appealed not to animal-welfare laws, but the doctrine of habeus corpus, something humans use to challenge unjust detention.

John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview and I talked this week about the issue of legal personhood, and how turning the idea on its head has some serious implications, intended or not.

“By trying to include chimpanzees into the definition of personhood we’re going to, in effect, leave others out,” Stonestreet said. The lawyers in the case argue the animals deserve human rights based on characteristics such as the ability to feel pain and certain cognitive and emotional capacities.

“If that’s the definition that gives us value as human persons, then there are some human persons who don’t have value because there are some … who don’t feel pain,” Stonestreet said. “There are some human persons don’t have emotional stability, who do not have certain levels of cognitive awareness.”

The answer, Stonestreet said, is to define personhood as an inherent quality of humans because they are a special creation, not based on extrinsic characteristics.

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