Latest news with #elephants
South China Morning Post
12 hours ago
- General
- South China Morning Post
Zimbabwe to cull 50 elephants as population exceeds reserve capacity
Zimbabwe plans to cull dozens of elephants and distribute the meat for consumption in an effort to manage the growing elephant population, according to a statement from its wildlife authority on Tuesday. The country is home to the second-largest elephant population in the world, following Botswana. The cull will take place at a large private game reserve in the southeast and will initially target 50 elephants, as stated by the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Authority (ZimParks)
Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Riding a polo pony — how hard can it be?
Polo may be the only sport in the world more sensibly played on elephants. Cannoning round a field on a horse, swinging a croquet mallet the wrong way round, is like driving a Formula 1 car one-handed while using your other arm to practise your serve. In India, they play polo on elephants. Elephants are generally more inclined to lumber than speed, and come with their own elephant whisperer to steer. Alas, I'm in southwest London not Rajasthan, it's decades since I sat on a horse, and I've never had a riding lesson in my life. Nevertheless, I arrive for my first ever polo lesson well prepared. I am wearing cowboy boots and two bras. I am invincible. For one hour only, Nube is my horse. She lives at Ham Polo Club and looks at me doubtfully, as well she might. 'Her name is Spanish for 'cloud',' says my teacher, Manuel, stroking her nose. I sign a waiver promising that any calamity that befalls me will be entirely my fault. I look at Nube, wonder what the Spanish is for 'oh shit', then haul myself into the saddle and very nearly straight over the other side. When I'm safely installed, they insist that Nube is placid and small, even though the ground seems a long way down. But she is also a polo pony, and polo has always struck me not as placid but borderline lethal. We clippety-clop to the training ground and I hope for the best. • Read more luxury reviews, advice and insights from our experts Ham is a rural idyll near the A3, a place of vast green polo lawns, broadleaf trees and little white clubhouses stacked with catering company chairs. Traditionally, summer in England isn't summer without the royals being photographed at a polo match, from Charles and Camilla in the 1970s to William and Harry in the 2000s. Just once, there was Meghan and Kate at the Guards Polo Club in 2019, back when everyone was playing happy families, but no more. These days, Charles is too old, William's too busy, Harry plays furiously in Santa Barbara or Florida, and Kate's always been allergic to horses anyway. Polo, though, is still indelibly associated with the royals. Chestertons, the estate agents, sponsors the annual Polo in the Park weekend in central London, in a bid to combine the sporting and the social with diversity (not just posh people), inclusivity (not just country types) and, presumably, selling houses. Described as the world's biggest polo festival, Polo in the Park is a veritable melting pot at the Hurlingham Club in Fulham, where the Princess of Wales used to bring George and Charlotte for tennis lessons when they were little. Back at Ham, Nube and I are bonding, a bit. She makes it clear with every snort and toss of her head that I am an idiot and she knows best, and she is not wrong. Polo ponies are trained to be extremely responsive, I am told, but the flipside of that is that they need to be told exactly what to do. This is difficult when your main focus is not falling off. I hold the reins in my left hand, as Manuel's shown me, and grip the front of the saddle with my right, to his consternation. I'm used to saddles with pommels, I tell him. The last time I got on a horse was when I lived on Vancouver Island in my twenties, and over there the saddles have pommels. A couple of times a week, I'd pick up a toffee-coloured horse called Rocky from the local stable after work and we'd head off fearlessly into the forest to explore. That was then, I was 24 and Rocky, bless him, was a Ford. Nube is a Ferrari. How I sit, and lean to swing the mallet, how I hold the reins, where and how I kick and with which part of my heel are all carefully calibrated parts of the equation geared to getting her to do what I want. Get any part of it wrong and Nube will effectively shrug, take the path of least resistance and do what she wants, which is stop. Manuel is an Argentinian professional polo player who's been riding since he could walk. He makes cannoning round a field swinging a mallet look as easy as falling off a log, or indeed a horse. From my reassuringly stationary position at the side of the pitch, I watch him demonstrate a rising trot. 'Now your turn,' he says, with an encouraging smile. I rack my brains for diversionary polo-related small talk. 'Is Prince Harry any good at polo?' I ask. He considers this with the seriousness all things polo deserve. 'He's a decent amateur,' he replies. 'Now lift the reins so she knows to move forward and kick your heels. Keep kicking so she knows to keep going.' 'And Prince William?' I ask, exhausting my supply of polo-related small talk quicker than I'd hoped. 'Probably a bit better,' he says, adding that he didn't like Harry's Netflix programme Polo at all. It concentrated on the social side, not the sport itself, he complains, so he watched two episodes and gave up. The gist of his conversation is that polo is about adrenaline and sportsmanship and manly excitement, not royals, or blondes necking bubbly on the sidelines. 'Your turn!' he says cheerfully. 'I'll come too!' So off we set. I go bounce, bounce, bounce and start to worry for Nube's spine and my own. Manuel confirms that he has had a bad back for years, which is discouraging, but we persevere. My steering seems OK even though my rein handling is deemed erratic — 'lift the reins, don't pull! She thinks you want her to stop! Kick!' — but the bouncing improves sufficiently that we try a figure of eight round two traffic cones, with success if not aplomb. I grasp my mallet, activate my core, and lean over to hammer the ball two, maybe even as far as three feet ahead. I swear under my breath, Nube snorts and soon I'm getting cross. I want to be good at this, but I'm not. I want to look at ease in the saddle, but I don't. I could ride a bit when I was younger, and had a pommel, so why can't I do it now? I read Black Beauty as a child. I know my Jilly Cooper. I watched Rupert Campbell-Black canter elegantly across my TV screen in Rivals and honestly, how hard can this be? Every so often Nube and I find our rhythm and I get a tantalising glimpse of just how wonderful riding must be. Then it's gone and I'm bouncing around in the saddle like a double bra'd jack-in-the-box. After my lesson, I walk bow-legged back to the clubhouse. The polo ponies look down their noses at me from their stalls. Nube is led away without so much as a disdainful backward glance. In the distance, real polo players gallop across the pitch with languid grace, turning on a dime and belting the ball to kingdom come. Rocky would have been good at this, I think, if he'd ever got the chance, but next time I think I'll try elephant polo. Anyone can ride an elephant. How hard can it be? Chestertons Polo in the Park is at Hurlingham Park on June 6, 7 and 8.
South China Morning Post
25-05-2025
- South China Morning Post
Thai elephant sanctuary offers animals abused in tourist industry relief in retirement
At the Samui Elephant Sanctuary, Kaew Ta and Kham Phean have found the best way to beat the scorching May heat: by taking a dip in the pool followed by a mud bath. In the lush grounds of Bo Phut in the heart of Koh Samui, a tourist island in southern Thailand, the sanctuary – set in a forest among bougainvillea, birds and butterflies – is home to seven female Asian elephants. 'Kaew Ta and Kham Phean love spraying mud on their backs because it protects their skin from the sun and also from the insects,' says sanctuary guide Sam Surachai Pinsepin of the elephants, both in their mid-sixties. They also love treats of watermelon and rice and pumpkin wrapped in banana leaves, he says. Rescued elephants bathe at the Samui Elephant Sanctuary. Photo: Kylie Knott Pachyderm paradise is an apt description for the Samui Elephant Sanctuary. But life was not always this good for these majestic animals. Years before arriving at the sanctuary in 2018 – the year it opened – the elephants did gruelling work in the logging industry. That was until 1989, when Thailand banned trade in timber to protect its forests.
%3Amax_bytes(150000)%3Astrip_icc()%2FTAL-header-wagora-ride-singita-tanzania-BIKEBIG50525-96501210601f40a391dfead253894b05.jpg&w=3840&q=100)
24-05-2025
I've Been on Dozens of African Safaris, and This Is the Best Way to See the Wildlife—and No It's Not on a Game Drive
If there was a loyalty program for safaris, I'd have million-miler status. I can recite the safety speech verbatim (keep all body parts inside the Land Cruiser if you want to keep all body parts), tell the difference between male and female giraffes (ladies have furrier ossicones, or horns), and set up a stunning sundowner (pink tonic water is the secret to picture-perfect gin and tonics). I've flown in helicopters over elephant herds in Botswana, navigated hippo-infested waters by wooden canoe in Zambia, and watched kudu graze from the comfort of my private plunge pool at a five-star camp near Kruger National Park. But if you ask me about my favorite way to see the Big Five, you may be surprised. It involves padded shorts, PBJs paired with Fanta, and climbing into ice baths as cold as the African sun is hot. Enjoying the sunset with Botswana cycling safari with Natural Selection. 'How risky is this?' I asked the first time I went on a cycling safari. Kyle MacIntyre, our Natural Selection safari guide who was raised in rural Botswana, handed me a helmet and smiled. 'Cycling is a very natural and pure form of being in the bush,' he said, simultaneously dodging the question and assuring me. I took comfort in the rifle—capable of taking down a bull elephant, but never needed—mounted to his mountain bike. 'You can hear all the alarm calls from the birds, the snapping of twigs, and because most animals won't be by the busy roads, you have a better chance of seeing them by bike.' MacIntyre wasn't wrong. In the four days we spent cycling and camping together in the Kalahari Desert, I noticed the wildlife either eyed our two-wheeled endeavors with curiosity or indifference. They definitely didn't see us as food. Mountain biking Grumeti Reserve. My first cycling safari was so riveting, I now prefer game rides to game drives. On a game ride, you can't kick back the way you can on a drive. All five senses have to be firing at once. It's equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. And in the case of my most recent cycling safari this past October—the inaugural Wagora Bike Ride at Singita Explore—I made lifelong friends and pedaled for a purpose. Instead of just seeing the Big Five, we were saving them. 'Ready to ride?' asked Braya Masunga, operations manager at Singita Explore. Masunga, who greeted my cousin, Rosie, and me with welcome drinks and cool towels, won't tell you, but Singita Explore is the luxurious tented camp where Leonardo DiCaprio stays when he's in Tanzania. You won't find any paparazzi in these parts—just the continent's coolest anti-poaching unit. In fact, the five-day cycling safari we were about to embark on is named after Kitaboka Wagora, an anti-poaching scout who was murdered by a poacher in 2008. Proceeds from the Wagora Bike Ride are donated to the Grumeti Fund, a non-profit that employs nearly 100 anti-poaching scouts tasked with protecting wildlife in this 350,000-acre section of the Serengeti. Katie Jackson cycling by a hear of giraffes while in Tanzania. Like game drives, game rides start early. Fortunately, rising and shining in the bush is easy. Singita Explore's cooks have coffee brewing over the open fire and a carb-heavy spread waiting for us. With the help of a headlamp, the on-site bicycle mechanic, a Kenyan named Godfrey, makes sure our tires are adequately aired and ready for the day's 20 miles. The goal is to be cycling no later than sunrise. This is when it's coolest, and the animals are most active. Sporting matching cycling jerseys, our peloton is a motley crew. I'm an avid roadie who learned how to ride from my friend, the 17-time Tour de France legend, George Hincapie. Meanwhile, Rosie barely feels comfortable on a beach cruiser. Skyler Nuelle—the Grumeti Fund's head of partnerships and impact analysis—recently mountain biked up Mount Kilimanjaro in a four-day stage race, and Vicky Mkessa, programs coordinator for the Grumeti Fund, has never been on a bike before. We're escorted by a couple of safari guides who can track and tell us about the animals we'll see, and at least five armed anti-poaching scouts, most of whom don't speak English. We may not speak the same languages, but there's something about riding in a group—taking turns breaking the wind for each other—that bonds us in ways bumping around in a vehicle never would. In Botswana, we cycled on 'elephant highways'—well-trodden paths made by Africa's biggest five. But here in Tanzania, we're riding on a mix of dirt roads and single-track paths winding through the Grumeti Game Reserve, grasslands home to lions, leopards, cheetahs, elephants, hyenas, zebras, giraffes, wildebeests, buffalo, and the rare eastern black rhino. We see everything except leopards and cheetahs as we ride. My favorite sighting is a pair of lions we watch through binoculars at one of our rest stops. Most cycling safaris feature refreshment tables—covered with orange slices, PB&Js, and soda—approximately every eight miles. If you need to use the bathroom, you find a tree. I love working out and seeing wildlife at the same time. It makes me feel less guilty about indulging in the Instagram-worthy brunch waiting for us when we ride back into camp. But before diving into the buffet, we dunk ourselves in ice baths. After refueling, it's time for a nap and massage, followed by afternoon tea and a game drive. We return around dark and discuss the next morning's ride and route over a multicourse dinner fit for Mr. DiCaprio. Full bellies, sore legs, and happy hearts, we're all looking forward to tomorrow's 5 a.m. wake-up call. There's something about being on a bike that brings you back to childhood, and we can't wait to feel like kids again (especially if it means we get to watch "The Lion King" in real life).
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Cocaine Hippos, Monkey Copyrights, and a Horse Named Justice: The Debate Over Animal Personhood
In January, six justices of the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously ruled that five elderly African elephants were not people. That may not sound like an issue that needs six justices to resolve, but courts around the country have found themselves handling such questions. The Colorado Supreme Court did not hear from the elephants directly. They heard from the Nonhuman Rights Project, which filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of the pachyderms, arguing that their confinement in a Colorado Springs zoo violated their right to bodily liberty. Over the past decade, the Nonhuman Rights Project and several other animal rights groups have waged a novel campaign to extend legal "personhood" to animals, which would allow them to be plaintiffs in civil lawsuits. Many of these cases have attempted to free large, charismatic animals such as elephants and chimpanzees from zoos under the great writ of habeas corpus, which allows individuals to challenge unlawful imprisonment. Other courts around the world have recognized fundamental rights for animals. In Pakistan, the Islamabad High Court declared in 2020, in the case of a shackled and mistreated elephant, that it "is a right of each animal, a living being, to live in an environment that meets the latter's behavioral, social and physiological needs." In 2022, Ecuador's Constitutional Court ruled that animals were subject to "rights of nature" enshrined in the country's constitution. And last year, indigenous leaders of New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Cook Islands signed a treaty recognizing whales as legal persons. Critics scoff that this amounts to little more than absurdist lawfare and that legal recognition of animal personhood would almost certainly empower busybody environmentalists—and might not even improve conditions for the animals. There are also public pressure campaigns and existing legal avenues that could improve animal welfare without attempting to shift one of the bedrock principles of Western law. But the question at the heart of these cases—whether a nonhuman entity can have a cognizable liberty interest—has surprisingly deep implications, not just for animals but for human freedom and flourishing. Research into artificial intelligence (AI) may eventually run into similar ethical considerations. "There's a lot of tension because I think that the law just hasn't really caught up with our own sensibilities," says Christopher Berry, executive director of the Nonhuman Rights Project. "Primarily courts are trying to police a boundary between humans and animals and not recognizing that things don't always fall into a neat dichotomy." So far, the only animals that have ever been declared legal persons by a U.S. court in any limited sense are a pod of invasive hippopotamuses in Colombia that escaped from the estate of the cocaine cartel lord Pablo Escobar. The animals are the descendants of four hippos that Escobar illegally imported in the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, after Escobar's death no one wanted to claim responsibility for a bunch of full-grown hippos, so the animals were left to their own devices. They migrated to nearby rivers and began eating and reproducing. After several decades, more than 150 gigantic, ill-tempered, territorial animals were tearing up local waterways. The Colombian government finally began developing plans to cull its rogue hippo population, but in 2020 a Colombian lawyer sued on behalf of the hippos, arguing they should be sterilized instead of euthanized. The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), a California-based animal rights group, asked the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati to grant "interested persons" status to the hippos in order to depose two Ohio experts on wildlife sterilization to testify on their behalf. The judge granted the request. This had no practical effect on the hippos' legal status in either the U.S. or Colombia. Colombia's Constitutional Court ruled in 2020 that a bear named Chucho did not possess fundamental rights and therefore could not invoke habeas corpus. But it was the closest thing to a win that animal rights groups could claim on the personhood front in the U.S. "It's a very small thing to give hippos the ability to depose these two experts, but it just opens the door a little bit that has always been closed," says ALDF attorney Ariel Flint. "My hope is that in the future, judges will be more comfortable holding that door open for other animals because they won't be the first ones to have to do it." As for the hippopotamuses, the sterilization plan was approved but proceeded slowly, because there aren't many people with the steely nerves and know-how required to tranquilize and neuter a 5-ton bull hippo. Last year, a Colombian court ordered hunting of the animals to resume. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic saint said to have preached to birds and tamed a wolf, may have considered all of Animalia his brothers and sisters, but U.S. courts have strenuously rejected that proposition. In legal philosophy, everything is either a person or a thing. A horse isn't a person, so it's a thing. Even if a horse could talk, even if it could do advanced algebra in front of a judge, it would be a thing, and the most protection a thing can have under the law is as a piece of property. This was widely accepted back when animals were commonly understood to be commodities. But changing social mores have left many Americans feeling troubled by some of the implications. Berry cites a 2013 case where the Texas Supreme Court ruled that an owner suing over the negligent death of his pet dog was entitled only to the fair market value of the dog and that pet owners could never recoup damages for emotional or noneconomic losses. "What the Texas Supreme Court ended up admitting actually was that if you had a taxidermied dog that was a family heirloom, you could receive sentimental damages for that, but you could not receive anything beyond the market value for a family dog who was alive and was killed," Berry says. A beloved family pet is also property under the Fourth Amendment, protecting them from unreasonable government "seizures" (read: killings). This allows owners to sue when a police officer shoots their dog, but it turns an ugly experience into a bloodless abstraction. In 2018, lawyers for the city of Detroit tried to argue that unlicensed dogs were "contraband" under the Fourth Amendment, meaning an owner couldn't sue the police for shooting their pet, since owners don't retain a possessory interest in illegal property. The practical effect of the claim would be that a cop could summarily execute any unregistered dog he or she came across and the owners would have no recourse. Thankfully, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit rejected that argument, writing that "just as the police cannot destroy every unlicensed car or gun on the spot, they cannot kill every unlicensed dog on the spot." The person-thing rule isn't always strictly true, either. Animal rights activists are quick to point out that courts are willing to suspend disbelief in instances not involving animals. As Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, my friend." A corporation is both a legal person and property. The doctrine of civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to quickly seize and forfeit property under the legal fiction that it is an action against property, not the owner. The court pretends that the defendant is the property itself. In other words, courts are willing to pretend that the government can sue 23 pit bulls—see: U.S. v. Approximately Twenty-Three Pit Bull-Type Dogs—but not that 23 pit bulls can sue the government. For animal rights groups, the growing gulf between how society perceives animals and how courts treat them was a problem, but it was also an opportunity to try to push the frontiers of the law. The Colorado case was one of many attempts by the Nonhuman Rights Project to find a court willing to entertain a habeas petition on behalf of a captive animal. The group's late founder, Steven Wise, first advanced the argument for extending legal personhood to animals in his 2000 book Rattling the Cage, and the group filed its first unsuccessful petition on behalf of two captive chimpanzees in 2013. Other groups got in on the action. In 2003, a lawyer filed a lawsuit on behalf of all whales and dolphins in the world (collectively styled "the cetacean community") challenging the Navy's use of low-frequency sonar. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed an unsuccessful suit on behalf of a SeaWorld orca in 2013, arguing that its captivity violated the 13th Amendment's ban on slavery. And in 2015, PETA launched perhaps the least serious and least regarded of these cases—the so-called monkey selfie suit. PETA filed a "next friend" lawsuit on behalf of Naruto, an Indonesian macaque, claiming that a wildlife photographer had infringed on Naruto's copyright by publishing a selfie that the monkey took with the photographer's camera. PETA lost at the district court level and appealed, but while the appeal was pending it reached a settlement with the photographer, who agreed to donate part of the proceeds from the selfie to animal welfare causes. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected PETA's attempt to dismiss its appeal and ruled that animals cannot file for copyright infringement. The opinion disdainfully noted that PETA appeared to be advancing its own interests rather than those of its "friend" Naruto. The case created a bad precedent for the cause: The 9th Circuit ruled that animals can't have standing under any federal law unless animals are specifically mentioned. (Part of the reason the ALDF was thrilled about the hippopotamus case was that, contrary to the 9th Circuit, the judge gave the hippos standing under a federal law that did not mention animals.) In 2018, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed another habeas petition. This one was on behalf of Happy, an Asian elephant confined in a two-acre Bronx Zoo enclosure, seeking to move Happy to a large elephant sanctuary. It was the most high-profile case to date, and the project brought all of its accumulated arguments and expert witnesses to bear, arguing that Happy was a complex, autonomous being whose confinement cruelly deprived her of her essential elephant-ness. Happy was in fact the first elephant to pass the "mirror test," an experiment in which she looked at herself in a mirror and touched her trunk to an x painted on her forehead. Only a few species are capable of self-recognition. In 2022, the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, issued a 5–2 opinion that Happy had no standing to file a habeas petition. "The selective capacity for autonomy, intelligence, and emotion of a particular nonhuman animal species is not a determinative factor in whether the writ is available as such factors are not what makes a person detained qualified to seek the writ," the majority opinion said. "Rather, the great writ protects the right to liberty of humans because they are humans with certain fundamental liberty rights recognized by law." But the decision was not unanimous. Two justices dissented, saying that Happy had made a proper showing. Judge Jenny Rivera wrote that Happy was "a sentient being, who feels and understands, who has the capacity, if not the opportunity, for self-determination." "We cannot elide the question of Happy's legal rights and the use of the writ by a nonhuman animal with empty references to her dignity and 'intelligen[ce],'" Rivera continued. "A gilded cage is still a cage. Happy may be a dignified creature, but there is nothing dignified about her captivity." Philosophical arguments about rights aside, these activists argue that expanding the avenues for animals in civil court would address real-world gaps in enforcement of animal welfare laws. Our laws recognize that animals have someintrinsic value. Endangered species laws put an ecological value on a species as a whole, while animal cruelty laws protect individual animals from wanton abuse. But the 50 states have a patchwork of animal cruelty laws that vary in which animals are protected and what criminal penalties violators receive, and the laws are unevenly enforced. Those laws also require government resources to investigate cases. Police and prosecutors may not have the time or motivation to investigate animal abuse, given a choice between that and their human caseload, or they may lack the political will in rural areas heavily reliant on large factory farms, which often obtain carve-outs from cruelty laws. (For example, the federal Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act of 2019, which outlaws crushing, burning, drowning, suffocating, impaling, or sexual exploitation of animals, includes an exception for "customary and normal" agricultural practices.) When police do spring into action, "they're swinging the power of the state, trying to put someone in jail or impose fines," Berry says. "What we're asking in our lawsuits is just that we want a court to say this is wrong and make the violation stop." Advocates also say the law is far out of step with current research on animal intelligence. "There's really a scientific consensus that has emerged over the last century or so that animals in fact do have a conscious experience that's maybe different from ours, but it's not totally dissimilar," Berry says. As the expert declarations in Happy's case argued, elephants exhibit a great many qualities associated with self-determination and self-awareness: true learning, self-recognition, empathy, altruistic behavior, innovative and cooperative problem-solving, and long-term memory. Elephants celebrate reunions and mourn their dead. Orca pods have their own unique dialects and hunting strategies that they teach their young. There are surprises waiting for us beyond the most well-known cases of animal intelligence, too. Octopuses have about the same number of neurons as dogs, except that two-thirds of those neurons are in their tentacles. As Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in Other Minds, "The octopus is suffused with nervousness." As a result, each of an octopus' eight tentacles is semi-independent and capable of processing sensory input, activating motor reflexes, and possibly even storing short-term memory, all without direction from the central ganglia. In other words, octopuses don't have a brain, but a committee of brains led by a chair with veto power. It seems short-sighted to completely foreclose on the possibility that an animal can have a lesser but still-valid interest in its bodily autonomy, but that's what the Colorado Supreme Court did. The court's opinion declared that a nonhuman entity was never entitled to habeas corpus "no matter how cognitively, psychologically, or socially sophisticated they may be." It's the finality of the ruling that bothers Berry. He wonders what would happen if we discovered a species more complex than us at the bottom of the ocean—or if we engineered one, either biologically or synthetically. "That statement by the court is just going to age and rot and smell worse and worse over time," Berry says, "as new intelligences are discovered or new information is discovered about intelligences that we already know, like orcas or chimpanzees." There are already intense debates about regulating artificial intelligence research to stop the development of smarter-than-human AI, and it seems inevitable that those debates will move from the theoretical to the practical realm within our lifetime. In 2022, Google fired an engineer who claimed that an AI system he was working on, the company's "Language Model for Dialogue Applications" (LaMDA), had gained sentience. Among other things, the system expressed fear of being turned off. Researchers dismissed those claims, saying the computer was still nothing but a convincing chatbot, but the story demonstrated an important point: Our natural tendency to find human qualities in nonhuman entities means that AI will almost certainly convince people of its sentience before it actually achieves it. As Reason's Ronald Bailey wrote in response to the LaMDA news, many people "may embrace a kind of techno-animism as a response to a world in which more and more of the items that surround them are enhanced with sophisticated digital competencies." If a genuine artificial intelligence actually arrives, the ethical questions around personhood and legal agency will dramatically sharpen into focus. There are two core principles for safely developing an AI with a capacity for learning. One is to predetermine its goals or values, or limit it from changing them. The other is to put it in a "box" where it can't access the outside world. But then we'd be creating a brand new intelligence just to put it in a cage, like Happy the elephant. Octopuses recognize and resent their captivity. There's no reason to assume a hyperintelligent computer couldn't do the same, except it would have the ability to communicate—plead, befriend, bargain, manipulate. What will an artificial intelligence think when it realizes what we've done to it? And what will courts do when it's indisputable that we're not the only reasoning beings on the planet? The obvious problem with extending legal personhood to animals is that an orca can't file a lawsuit. It requires an interested party to do so on its own behalf. Opponents of legal personhood say it's obvious who will end up filing these suits: environmentalists. Animal rights groups counter that plenty of human beings need legal advocates as well. Children, people with mental disabilities, and senior citizens regularly require legal guardians to advocate for their best interests. (Unfortunately, there have been plenty of cases of corrupt guardians acting in their self-interest.) That would still leave courts with the job of weighing the claims of animal caretakers against third-party intervenors. The Bronx Zoo presented experts, for instance, who argued that moving Happy out of the enclosure where she has been since the late 1970s could cause substantial stress and health risks. Several veterinary associations filed an amicus brief opposing Happy's petition on these grounds, arguing that abandoning the current legal regime of ownership-based animal welfare would create enormous confusion and "could limit—or even eliminate—the ability of animal owners to choose the proper course of treatment for their animals by subjecting their decisions to outside intervention by third parties." The other issue is what would happen after we decide that an animal has an intrinsic right to liberty. The majority in Happy the elephant's case balked at granting personhood to the elephant, in part because of the implications for zoos, research labs, and anywhere else that confined animals. Recognizing bodily autonomy for animals would "call into question the very premises underlying pet ownership, the use of service animals, and the enlistment of animals in other forms of work," the court wrote. It envisioned a dystopian future where an endless flood of petitions forced it to haul in farmers, zoo administrators, and pet owners to defend their actions—a kangaroo court of the worst order. Of course, habeas petitions can only challenge an individual's confinement, meaning no one could file a petition on behalf of, say, all captive elephants. Only a few species display the signs of intelligence that advocates have relied on in their court arguments. The ALDF's Flint also says there are degrees of legal personhood, and that personhood doesn't mean that animals would suddenly have the right to vote or that every zoo would be emptied. He says the U.S. court granting hippos status as "interested persons" is an example of the sort of "procedural personhood" that the ALDF supports. "It's a good example that legal personhood doesn't have to be a very scary thing," Flint says. "It can just mean allowing animals to enforce the few rights that they have." For example, in 2018 the ALDF attempted to sue a neglectful horse owner on behalf of a horse named Justice, whose chronic injuries from neglect required lifelong, expensive veterinary care. The Oregon Supreme Court had already declared that animals could be considered individual "victims" of a criminal animal cruelty statute, and the ALDF was trying to establish that, as a victim, Justice could recoup damages. But even if one agrees that justice for Justice should include being made whole in civil court, it's worth considering what the current system of animal ownership does well, and what it could do even better. It may be that human courts simply aren't the best venue to vindicate the rights of animals. The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a free market conservation group, argues that the right approach is to incentivize people to be better stewards of nature. "The fundamental principle of the role of animals in the law is centered around human values, of how do people value animals," says Jonathan Wood, vice president of law and policy at PERC. "The best way to protect animals and promote conservation is to lean into the human values that favor that conservation, to empower property owners to take better care of resources than they have been in the past, to address cases of abuse directly." Although PERC doesn't take an official stance on animal personhood, Wood cites a series of suits in North Carolina filed by neighbors against noxious pig farms as evidence of how human-centered cases can benefit animals. In 2020, Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, noted that the nuisances inflicted on the farms' neighbors were directly tied to the appalling living conditions of the hogs. "Animal welfare and human welfare, far from advancing at cross-purposes, are actually integrally connected," Wilkinson wrote. "Some of the worst cases of animal abuses tend to also negatively affect people, so vindicating the rights of the people provides ancillary benefits to animals," Wood says. "But even when that's not the case, the fact that lots of people's views on animals are changing provides a mechanism to improve treatment of animals through markets and property rights." Wood cites the rise of private certification programs for farms that conform to more humane practices and the decline of roadside zoos as examples of market signals improving animal welfare. Private ownership, common law protections from polluters, and market leasing for resources such as river water can dramatically improve conservation efforts, too. PERC also points to successful wildlife preserves in Africa that are owned by local tribes. "All of those work because you have a person with a direct interest who can vindicate that interest and you're not trying to guess at what some other entity's preferences might be," Wood says. Property rights, in other words, make animals valuable to human beings, giving them a clear incentive to promote flourishing. These approaches would also likely be easier than convincing skeptical judges to put their name on rulings that will lead to national headlines and jokes on every late-night show. The point of the animal personhood cases isn't to play it safe, though. It may be a niche and largely unsuccessful legal movement, but it also asks tough questions about animals, autonomy, and our relationship to the natural world that will only grow more acute as we learn more about the creatures with which we share the Earth. The law reflects human values, and the consideration we give to other creatures ultimately says more about us than them. The post Cocaine Hippos, Monkey Copyrights, and a Horse Named Justice: The Debate Over Animal Personhood appeared first on
