One of these times, one of these dog right crazies will appear before an extremely nuts judge and get a case that frees some wild bird from a park.
Thankfully, that day has not already arrived. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 6-0 on Tuesday that six animals in the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo may be transferred to an elephant sanctuary based on the legal theory that they have the equal rights as human beings.
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The judge said the selection “does not turn on our respect for these majestic creatures. “
” Rather, the legal issue here boils down to whether an elephant is a man,” the judge said. ” And because an elephant is never a man, the animals here do not have standing to take a habeas corpus state. “
You have to say that it’s a really smart fundraising approach by the Nonhuman Rights Project, which has sued a few times over the last decade trying to free animals and primates from various parks. They haven’t previously been effective, but that doesn’t matter as long as the money keeps coming in.
The elephant — Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo — had no coherent reply.
That doesn’t think they can’t talk. Researchers have discovered an incredible number of noises that elephants produce at an incredible range of frequencies. We don’t understand what they’re saying, of course, but that it’s a powerful example of mental thinking is obvious.
But, until animals can send a legal quick on their own, they are out of fortune in American authorities.
El Paso County Court dismissed the case in June, ruling that the writ of habeas corpus does n’t apply to elephants because animals do not qualify as “persons ” under state or federal law. The Nonhuman Rights Project appealed the situation to the Colorado Supreme Court, which has now upheld that choice.
“‘Person ’ is a term that attaches to any individual or entity possessing ( or capable of possessing ) a legal right, ” the Nonhuman Rights Project wrote in its October appeal. “…If creatures have lawful rights, then they are authorized persons. ”
The state’s Supreme Court justices disagreed with the activists and affirmed the neighborhood court’s June decision, ruling that habeas corpus does not use to human animals, “no matter how mentally, cognitively or morally superior they may be. ”
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Cheyenne Zoo officials were relieved at the decision and angry at the Non(in? )human Rights Project.
“The courts have proven now five times that their approach is n’t reasonable, but they continue to take it. It seems their real goal is to manipulate people into donating to their cause by incessantly publicizing sensational court cases with relentless calls for supporters to donate, ” zoo officials said.
An “animal law” professor at the University of Denver took time from fleecing students and wasting time to comment on the case.
“The elephants, in this case, are undeniably emotionally and cognitively complex individuals that suffer immensely due to their captivity,” said Justin Marceau, director of the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project.
No one is arguing about their intelligence and the complexity of their emotional and cognitive lives. Do they” suffer immensely”? Maybe someday we’ll be able to ask them.
Marceau said that excluding all nonhuman animals from the right to habeas corpus “has arbitrarily prohibited ( animals ) from exercising their rights to be free of unlawful captivity. ”
Even if the elephants could be considered persons under Colorado law, the Nonhuman Rights Project still did n’t have evidence to support the claim that they were unlawfully confined, Supreme Court justices wrote in an opinion summary Tuesday.
The “Zoo holds the elephants under a broad framework of laws that permit zoos to hold nonhuman animals for public display in exactly the manner the Zoo is doing, ” the justices wrote.
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Capturing an animal in the wild and then bringing them to live the rest of their lives in a zoo is cruel. That’s why almost all legitimate zoos have captive breeding programs where they buy and sell animals from other zoos worldwide that were born in captivity.
When captivity is all an animal knows, it don’t know what it’s missing.
