Should Dolphins Have the Right to Life?

A couple weeks ago, the web was abuzz with news articles about the idea of granting "human" rights to animals. The articles came out of a declaration at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Vancouver, Canada.

The declaration released at the world's largest science conference states that "every individual cetacean has the right to life", "no cetacean should be held in captivity or servitude, be subject to cruel treatment, or be removed from their natural environment", and "no cetacean is the property of any state, corporation, human group or individual." It also suggests, "The rights, freedoms and norms set forth in this declaration should be protected under international and domestic law."

 Newspapers quickly grabbed on to the topic with attention-grabbing headlines. The BBC titled their article, "Dolphins deserve same rights as human, say scientists."

It was a catchy headline that was not altogether true, as the declaration didn't say cetaceans should be granted the SAME rights as humans, or that they should be considered humans. Some might laugh at the very idea of granting any non-human animal the rights of a person. However, it's not unprecedented.

Eric Michael Johnson wrote an interesting blog article, in which he says, "This is not as radical an idea as it may sound. The law is fully capable of making and unmaking “persons” in the strictly legal sense.

Such a flexible interpretation of personhood was demonstrated most dramatically in 1886 when the Supreme Court granted personhood status to the first nonhuman. In this case it was a corporation and Southern Pacific Railroad (part of robber baron Leland Stanford’s empire) snuck in through a legal loophole to gain full personhood rights under the 14th Amendment. Such rights have now been extended to all corporations under the Citizens United ruling in 2010...”

Johnson says that granting personhood rights to a nonhuman animal has already been done in Spain. In 2008, the Spanish Parliament granted limited personhood rights to great apes.

Granted limited rights to sentient animals seems like a good idea, one that would probably have more impact than the current laws that attempt to protect "endangered species."

How different would our world be if we recognized that some (many? all?) animals have a right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?