The elephant known as Happy has lived at the Bronx Zoo over 40 years. The Non-Human Rights Project has attempted to litigate a case to have an animal declared a person and Happy is their most recent client. New York’s Supreme Court, known as the Court of Appeals, will soon decide on the issue to grant Happy such a legal status. The NhRP has long sought this legal declaration but, thankfully, has been unsuccessful.

If NhRP prevails, the group will, most likely, litigate even more lawsuits using a ruling supporting their claim as the basis for it. Consequently, it will lead to a whole host of new legal questions that can seriously undermine not only our court system, but how humans are to interact with animals. In short, the courts will be weaponized in order to destroy and not protect. The intent of groups like NhRP is not the well-being of animals, but to undermine civil societies, like those in the West.

While cruelty toward animals is reprehensible, efforts on the part of animal rights groups seeking to give animals the same rights as humans is even more despicable. So-called animal rights groups’ definition of cruelty, just like their views on when rights apply and activities like litigating cases like this, is only geared to destroy individual rights in order to obliterate human existence.

The basis of animal rights is grounded on a statement made by French philosopher Rene Descartes who said: I feel pain, therefore I have rights. English philosopher John Locke later corrected Descartes stating that in order for someone to have individual rights they have to have the capacity to understand what they are (or reason) and the only beings who do, are humans.

Unlike what animal rights groups (like NhRP and PETA) allege, individual rights are not based on a being’s capacity to feel pain, but are based on a being’s capacity to think. It is mankind’s ability to think and reason including deliberate with one another that makes humans nature’s favored species. Animals lack any rational faculties in which their primary means of survival is predatory instincts and not rational discourse.

So-called animal rights groups prefer the nihilistic savagery of the animal kingdom over the rational civilization of mankind.

PHOTO CREDIT: New York Court of Appeals circa 2009 – By Tracy Collins, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27288655