PERSONHOOD FOR CHIMPS! In state with hightest abortion rates!

An animal rights group has filed a lawsuit seeking “legal personhood” for chimpanzees in the state of New York, the state that ranks at or near the top of the nation’s highest abortion rates.

Reuters is reporting that the non-profit Nonhuman Rights Project has sued in New York state court to declare a 26-year-old chimp named Tommy “a cognitively complex autonomous legal person with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned.”

 

 The following comes directly from the Reuters story:

The lawsuit seeks a declaration that Tommy’s “detention” in a “small, dank, cement cage in a cavernous dark shed” in central New York is unlawful and demands his immediate release to a primate sanctuary.
Chimpanzees “possess complex cognitive abilities that are so strictly protected when they’re found in human beings,” Steven Wise, the president of Nonhuman Rights Project, told Reuters.
“There’s no reason why they should not be protected when they’re found in chimpanzees,” he added.