The Provocative Elitism of “Personhood” for Nonhuman Creatures in Animal Advocacy Parlance and Polemics

Abstract

Animal advocates cannot allow the idea to take hold that only the great apes and certain other “higher” animals are fit to be “persons.” Working to change the moral status of the great apes or sea mammals, for example, is a legitimate and important undertaking, but it should not be done at the expense of other animals. Such thinking is not only disconnected from real animals in the real world; it perpetuates the view that beings belonging to species deemed “nonpersons” or “merely conscious” are of lesser, or no, moral significance until or unless, through an institutionalized system of painful, stressful, and demeaning experiments over decades or centuries, some of them might “prove” themselves worthy of being called persons or semi-persons or sort-of-persons entitled to whatever privileges such designations may confer.