Sorry Animal Rights Wackos: New York Judge Says Chimpanzees Still Don’t Get Legal Person Status

A few months ago the animal rights extremists of the nation were celebrating when they thought that a New York court was going to give legal human rights status to a pair of chimpanzees. Well, now a NY judge has nixed that idea. So, no, chimps aren’t people too in New York.

The court case centers around a pair of chimps at a scientific research center that some animal rights extremists decided to try to bestow “human rights” upon so that they could get let free. The animal rights group sued to get the chimps declared “legal persons” and now we have a ruling.

Earlier this year another judge said that the chimps do have human status. But it looks like the celebrating was premature

The Nonhuman Rights Project, a non-profit activist group in Coral Springs, Florida, sued on behalf of the 8-year-old chimps in March, arguing that they’re autonomous, intelligent creatures and that holding them at the State University of New York at Stony Brook is illegal imprisonment. It said Thursday it would appeal the ruling.

In a ruling filed Thursday in Manhattan, New York State Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe turned down the group’s request to approve a writ of habeas corpus — the legal mechanism under which people are freed from unlawful detention. But she indicated that she sympathized with Hercules, Leo and their supporters.

Jaffe called campaigns to extend rights to chimpanzees “understandable,” noting that humans and chimps share 99 percent of their DNA. She even predicted that “some day [such campaigns] may even succeed,” because the status of “legal person” doesn’t necessarily equal “human being.”

Corporations, for example, are often protected by what she called the “legal fiction of personhood.”

But for now, she said, she has to follow precedent set in a case from December, when another New York judge upheld the longstanding principle that “legal persons” have duties and responsibilities to go along with rights — duties and responsibilities that chimps can’t perform.

Therefore, “animals, including chimpanzees and other highly intelligent mammals, are considered property under the law,” Jaffe wrote.

Seems to me that liberals aren’t legal persons by that ruling. They rarely fulfill the responsibilities to go along with rights!

Warner Todd Huston

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, BigJournalsim.com and all Breitbart News' other sites, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, and many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs across the country to discuss his opinion editorials and current events as well as appearing on TV networks such as CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, and various Chicago-based news programs. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture" which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston and follow him on Twitter, on Google Plus , and Facebook.

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