Animals have rights, too... -- RealityFans

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Date Posted: 19:44:16 05/17/02 Fri
Author: Tweety
Subject: Animals have rights, too...

German animals get bill of rights
Fri May 17, 1:08 PM ET

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's parliament has voted to give animals constitutional rights, a step unprecedented in Europe which had animal lovers cheering but some groups questioning politicians' priorities.

Over 540 members of parliament voted in favour of a amendment to the country's 53-year-old constitution to include the protection of animals. Just 19 politicians opposed the change, while 15 abstained.

The move on Friday, widely expected to be approved by Germany's second chamber, was essentially a symbolic gesture aiming to "protect animals by legislation", the amendment said without mentioning specifics. But its supporters said it gave animal rights a new moral weight.

Greens party politicians, who campaigned for the change for a decade, said existing laws had not done enough to protect animals from harm.

"Previously...animal rights came into conflict with other rights such as research, religious or educational rights," Greens deputy Ulrike Hoefken said in a statement. "Now it is part of the constitution it is given a fairer weight."

By giving animal rights the same level of constitutional support as already exists for freedom of scientific research, the amendment provides animal rights campaigners who object to laboratory testing of animals with a stronger legal weapon.

Not all observers approved the constitutional change.

"Of course protecting animals is important. But what about our young people and their rights?" a spokeswoman for children's group Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk said.

The German federal administrative court banned the traditional Muslim slaughter of animals in 1995 as the practice did not seek to lessen animals' pain before death. Germany's Constitutional Court earlier this year overturned the ban, which relaunched debate on the issue.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=856&ncid=856&e=1&u=/nm/20020517/od_uk_nm/oukoe_germany_animals_1

Man Gets Visitation Rights for Dog
Fri May 17, 8:41 AM ET

MADRID, Spain (AP) - A divorce court judge has granted visitation rights to a man who missed his dog.

The judge in southeast Alicante province said the Spaniard gets the animal on weekends and his ex-wife has custody during the week.

In the middle of their tug-of-war is a pint-sized pooch known as a griffon.

The couple's name was not disclosed. They were described in newspapers as a middle-aged couple living in the town of El Campello.

The verdict was handed down in March but only surfaced this week when the man's lawyer was overheard swapping stories at a lawyers convention.

The attorney, Jose Luis Gonzalez, said the woman had argued that it was she who bought the dog seven years ago so it was hers to keep.

But the judge ruled the dog was like the rest of the couple's property and had to be divvied up somehow.

Gonzalez said the verdict was a victory for animal rights. "It shows that a dog is not just an object," he said from Alicante.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=816&ncid=816&e=2&u=/ap/20020517/ap_on_fe_st/spain_disputed_dog_2

Focus-Animals have rights too
Fri May 17,10:13 AM ET

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Steven Wise has represented a dolphin in court, got vicious dogs off death row and was the first person to teach an animal rights course at a U.S. law school.

But then he realised that it wasn't enough to save the lives of a few hundred dogs, an occasional deer, or the odd ape. So he set about the ambitious task of trying to change the law so that entire species -- notably dolphins, chimpanzees and gorillas -- could be granted basic legal rights.

Wise is not a loony liberal with a menagerie of chickens, chimps and cats liberated from fates worse than death in some battery farm, zoo or medical research laboratory -- although he sees such facilities as places of slavery and torture.

He regards as "entirely silly" the widely ridiculed refusal by the Washington Zoo to release the medical records of a dead giraffe on the grounds it would violate the giraffe's privacy rights.

Wise moreover is "not really a be-kind-to-animals sort of person", but a suit-wearing lawyer and Harvard professor whose arguments are based on the principles of justice and respect.

"It's not really a matter of trying to gain rights for nonhuman animals because I love them, but because I respect them and I believe others should respect them as well.

"My purpose is ... to take the values and principles that lie at the centre of our system of justice and point out that they are applicable not only to human beings, but to some nonhuman beings as well," Wise told Reuters in an interview.

FREEDOM AT LAST

In "Drawing the Line," Wise presses the legal and scientific case for extending basic rights of freedom from slavery and torture to chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas and Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins.

Basing his arguments on well-documented studies of their mental powers, emotional bonds, social skills, language and self-awareness, Wise says there is also increasing evidence to suggest that African elephants, African Gray parrots, honeybees and dogs may merit such legal rights.

In an age when it would be unthinkable to use newborn human babies, the profoundly senile, or the insane for biomedical research or display them for public entertainment, Wise asks why dolphins, chimps or elephants -- some of whom are more sophisticated than tiny infants -- should have to endure such indignities.

"There are some nonhuman animals who obviously have such complex minds and such strong personalities that they are indeed like our children, and they deserve to be treated with respect," said Wise, who has four-year old twins.

Animals are currently regarded under most Western law as property. But granting these eight species personhood would mean: "You could not use them in any way that you could not use my 4-year-old son. You couldn't eat them, kidnap them off the street and put them in a cage, do biomedical research on them, or exhibit them for profit in a zoo."

As if Wise's presentation of the scientific evidence was not enough, he uses the controversial analogy of the human slave trade to press home the ethical case.

"Human slavery was made possible by the rule that humans could be legal things, a concept that seems so wrong today but which was woven into the societies of its day," writes Wise.

"As legal things, nonhuman animals are treated today as human slaves were treated once and continue to be treated in those few places in which human slavery is unlawfully practised."

RATTLING THE CAGE

Wise dismisses as a "bogus argument" the contention that, in his ideal world, the courts would be flooded with lawsuits brought by lonely elephants, performing dolphins and tortured apes.

"Say it led to 100 lawsuits -- two in each U.S. state -- it wouldn't even be a blip on the radar. So many human lawsuits are about comparatively frivolous things.

"What we are talking about would be truly life and death decisions -- should this being live or die, should this being be tortured or suffer terrible pain?" he said.

Wise says he is "prepared to accept" that using chimpanzees in medical research, because of their similarities to humans, would help advance the fight against human disease.

"But it would lead to greater and faster advances if we were to go down to Main Street and kidnap 100 human beings and put them in biomedical research institutions. Clearly the ends don't justify the means.

"There are many many answers as to why we don't do it. But almost certainly the excuses people give would be entirely applicable to chimpanzees, with the possible exception of the not-very-good excuse that we are human and they're not. Which is like saying we're white, they're not; we're male, they're not; we're Christian, they're not."

Wise notes it took more than 2,000 years to change the way society viewed human slavery dating back to the enslavement of Persians by classical Greeks. But he is pleasantly surprised at how quickly his ideas are being talked about, and sometimes accepted.

Wise first taught his animal rights law class at Vermont law school, and has also taught it at Harvard and at John Marshall law school in Chicago. He teaches a masters course in the topic at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine.

"In 1995, I was the only person teaching an animal rights law class. Now there are 25 U.S. law schools with some kind of animal rights class, and I know of one in Scotland, one in Holland, and another in Vienna.

"All these things tell me that the idea, in a general form, that at least some nonhuman animals should have basic legal rights is beginning to catch on with a speed that is much faster than I ever would have thought," Wise said.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=856&ncid=856&e=8&u=/nm/20020517/od_uk_nm/oukoe_life_animals_1

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I'm sorry but the last fellow, Wise, takes this issue too far. -- Cari, 03:48:37 05/18/02 Sat