Animal rights case a bad precedent

Published 7:26 pm Friday, September 25, 2015

 

Sure, it’s a silly story – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has filed a lawsuit, saying a monkey has legal rights to the “selfie” it took of itself. But there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in this case. There’s a movement to redefine the word “person,” to include animals.

This goes beyond humane treatment of animals and even the way we feel about our own pets. It would set a dangerous precedent that would eventually be used to say that animals are the equal of humans, that a beast really is as important as a baby.

“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a monkey claiming that the monkey owns the rights to selfies it took,” the National Review reports. “Yep. The selfies in question were taken way back in 2011, when a monkey named ‘Naruto’ grabbed photographer David Slater’s camera and snapped them. No matter how much time has passed, however, PETA apparently considers it just way too big of a deal to let go.”

It’s not about the photo, or even about Naruto, whose charming grin is all over the Internet. It’s about something bigger.

“If we prevail in this lawsuit, it will be the first time that a nonhuman animal is declared the owner of property, rather than being declared a piece of property himself or herself,” PETA general counsel Jeffrey Kerr said in a statement.



This isn’t the first time a lawsuit has been filed on behalf of an animal to claim personhood. There’s ongoing litigation in several courts.

“Their goal is to win animals a toehold in the world of legal rights – a strategy that is the culmination of more than two decades of writing and legal work by lawyer Steven Wise and an allied group of attorneys, scientists and animal activists,” the Boston Globe reports. “They hope to have an animal declared a ‘person’ in a court of law, breaking down a legal barrier between humans and other species that has stood for millennia.”

Here’s the problem with that. Animals are fully deserving of our protections and our compassion.

But they are not persons. Declaring them so doesn’t raise them; it lowers us.

In his classic essay “Animal Rights and Wrongs,” the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Fuelner pointed to PETA’s declaration that eating chicken is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.

“This is not love for animals; it is callousness toward human suffering,” he wrote. “Those who think the animal-rights crowd is composed of harmless vegetarian teenagers ranting about fur coats need to think again. These are serious people with a serious-if scary-belief system. For example, animal-rights advocate Dr. Jerry Vlasak, writing about a man whose 5-year-old boy had open-heart surgery, says the boy’s life is ‘no more or less important than any other animal’s life, no matter how much (the father’s) emotions tell him otherwise.'”

The end game, of course, is elimination of meat-eating and animal testing – no matter the human cost.

We can love animals, without making them our equals.