CORPORATIONS HAVE loved authorized personhood because the nineteenth century. Now, it appears, they’ve firm. A dispute over the destiny of hippos in Colombia has given rise to a federal court docket ruling in Ohio that, for the primary time in American regulation, recognises animals as individuals.
Listen to this story
Your browser doesn’t assist the <audio> factor.
Enjoy extra audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.
This ought to come as welcome information to the 100-plus hippos of Colombia’s Magdalena river. They are the offspring of 4 hippos smuggled into the nation by Pablo Escobar, a drug lord. After Escobar died in a shoot-out with police in 1993, different specimens from his unique menagerie—ostriches, zebras, flamingos—discovered new houses in zoos. But the hippos took up residence within the mud of the Magdalena and bought to reproducing.
The surfeit of hippos has coated lakes with algae and will displace otters, manatees and endangered turtles. Hippos have begun wandering into villages, too—a possible peril for human individuals. Last yr the federal government thought of a cull, prompting a Colombian lawyer to take up the trigger. The hippos, his lawsuit says, get pleasure from safety below Colombian regulation and should not be killed.
Judge Karen Litkovitz, the federal decide in Ohio, doesn’t get to resolve the hippos’ destiny. But on October fifteenth she agreed with the Animal Legal Defence Fund that the hippos are “interested persons” below a regulation allowing overseas litigants to collect proof in America that will buttress their claims. Experts in non-surgical sterilisation might be deposed for his or her insights on PZP, a contraceptive that might spare the hippos whereas dampening their progress.
America just isn’t the primary nation to treat animals as authorized individuals. An Indian court docket cited the structure in banning a bullfighting competition in 2014. A decide in Argentina dominated that Sandra, an orangutan, was a non-human particular person eligible for higher environs than her concrete enclosure in a Buenos Aires zoo; she now luxuriates in a sanctuary in Florida. In 2020 a court docket in Islamabad, confronted with instances involving stray canines, an elephant and a bear, recognised the “right of each animal…to live in an environment that meets the latter’s behavioural, social and physiological needs”.
Judge Litkovitz’s determination just isn’t couched in such sweeping phrases. It stays to be seen whether or not different American courts take her cue in instances resembling that of Happy, an elephant on the Bronx Zoo who has proven indicators of self-awareness and distress. In 2022 New York’s highest court docket will contemplate whether or not the writ of habeas corpus—safety from unjust imprisonment—applies to Happy.
This article appeared within the United States part of the print version below the headline “Wallow on”