Unhappy!

Three months ago, after reading an essay in The New Yorker about a legal fight to gain personhood for elephants I blogged in support.  To me, it was a no-brainer.

Their brains are highly developed.  "Their huge brains are capable of complex thinking—including imitation, memory, coöperative problem-solving—and such emotions as altruism, compassion, grief, and empathy."

Altruism, compassion, empathy, all emotions lacking in many human beings, and yet they are merely animals while we humans are some superior species! 

If elephants can remember, imitate, work with groups, and show those emotions, don't they qualify to be recognized as persons?  If an abstract corporation can be legally recognized as a person, why not a real elephant?  Do corporations emote?  Do corporations die?  Do corporations give birth?  Elephants do them all, and more.

If fertilized human eggs are celebrated by half the country as having some kind of a personhood with rights,  don't elephants, and chimpanzees, and whales, and more deserve to be recognized as persons?  As non-human persons?

New York's highest court rejected the argument that the elephant, Happy, is a person and, thereby, allowed for the Bronx Zoo to continue to, well, harass and torture this highly intelligent and sentient animal.

The New York court's decision will certainly not be the last word on personhood for highly intelligent animals like elephants and chimpanzees.  The group that fought on behalf of Happy, The Nonhuman Rights Project, has filed a habeas corpus petition in the San Francisco Superior Court to require the Fresno Chaffee Zoo to come before the Court to attempt to justify the continued imprisonment of elephants Nolwazi, Amahle, and Vusmusi.  (The Fresno Chaffee Zoo has been rated as one of The 10 Worst Zoos for Elephants in North America.)

The science writer, Elizabeth Kolbert, writes in a recent issue of The New Yorker that "every year the outlook for nonhuman species grows grimmer." Her essay is about "the burgeoning field of bioacoustics," which, as the portmanteau suggests, is the combination of biology and acoustics.  A field of study that is all about the production, dispersion, and reception of sounds in animals.  Even insects. 

Kolbert quotes a British documentary filmmaker Tom Mustill, who writes: “The more we learn about other animals and discover evidence of their manifold capacities, the more we care, and this alters how we treat them.”

If science is what we need for a better treatment of animals, yes, bring more science.  But, we don't really need science as much as common sense.  It is foolish and arrogant to think that the cosmos is only about us humans, and that everything else--living and nonliving--are merely for us to use in any which way we deem fit.  Don't elephants have a right to be with other elephants in their own habitats?  Don't whales have a right to live in the deep waters and communicate with other whales?  And, if we are the most intelligent of all the animals, don't we have a responsibility to take care of the whales and elephants and rivers and forests and everything else?

Or, are we going to blindly believe that man rules over nature because "God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" and spread this message all over the world?

Does Happy the elephant deserve to be boxed in an enclosure in a zoo?