Elephants are people too

By 2018 “The Greatest Show on Earth” will be a few tons less great. That was the word on Thursday when Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus decided to pull the ponderous pachyderms from the playlist of their peripatetic program.

Was there a scandal? Were elephants being beaten with pogo sticks behind the tent flaps? No, you will find no smoking gun (or cannon) behind the decision of the circus’ parent company, Feld Entertainment. Rather, the earthshaking move is a response to mounting public pressure and changing public perception—with a little push from PETA. Statements elicited from Feld spokesmen after the announcement drip with careful (not to say scared-stiff) political correctness about elephant dignity.

Why elephants and not dogs or cats? It may be because elephants are “persons.” Dolphins, whales, and great apes too. So alleges the Nonhuman Rights Project. Animal welfare groups abound, but the NhRP is the first organization going to court for personhood rights of animals. Comb the organization’s home page, and after many uses of the phrase “nonhuman animals,” we come, in the last sentence of the 11th section, to the claim of personhood: “We are asking the courts to recognize, for the first time, that these cognitively sophisticated, autonomous beings are legal persons who have the basic right to not be held in captivity.”

The case of Tommy, a chimp residing in New York, is presently tied up in appeals, the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division having ruled that Tommy is not entitled to a common law writ of habeas corpus by virtue of the fact that he is not able to bear responsibilities. The NhRP will rebut that lots of human animals, notably the critters we call children, enjoy legal protection though they bear no responsibilities.

If you think the Tommy suit frivolous and doomed, meet Sandra, the Argentinian orangutan recently granted rights as a “non-human person.” After 20 years of illegal detention in a Buenos Aires zoo, she will be relocated to a nicer sanctuary in Brazil.

We must be careful to interject here that it is not the better treatment of animals that is worrisome. Proverbs 12:10 tells us that the righteous man cares for the needs of his animals. Rather, it is the cynical obfuscation of God’s created order that causes no end of mischief. If you need a reason to hate Darwinism, I suggest this diabolical muddying of the waters about who a “person” is. The NhRP speaks of its clientele as “members of species other than our own,” and proclaim that “Humans are animals; people tend to forget that. Under current law, the only animals recognized as having legal rights are humans.”

I wish I had a nickel for every time Christians were laughed to scorn for warning of the slippery slope regarding marriage—that if we allow a man to marry a man, someday we will be hard pressed to argue that a man cannot marry a chimpanzee. That day is here if legal personhood is conferred on a beast. Though you may like to think that common sense still stands against it, since when is common sense a bulwark against any evil practice where the legal wall is breached? How could it be? By what law?

The elephant in the room, of course, (my apologies to elephants, one of the NhRP’s celebrities) is the question of personhood for fully formed babies temporarily residing on the wrong side of the birth canal. If the NhRP prevails, chimps can be plaintiffs but full-term humans cannot. Five minutes after leaving the womb, they may be persons, but five minutes before, they are not. In a crazy, mixed-up, Darwin world, who will fight for the “human species of animal”?