Sam Machado

A fairly persuasive argument that at least certain nonhuman animals should be considered persons in the eyes of the law. I'm not convinced in the end, but it has opened my eyes a bit, and I do think elephants, chimpanzees, and cetaceans deserve higher levels of protection than they currently have.

The presentation is nice, and the book as a whole could easily serve as the storyboard for a film documentary.

I do admit that at times my mind did flash to this simplified and tasteless Denis Leary stand-up routine:
https://youtu.be/IZBAtd9rty8?si=08RV5piTwQLjM2rS… (meer)

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through Edelweiss. Content warning for animal exploitation.)

"Happy's case is one story in an international movement to restore rights and dignity to nonhuman animals. [...] To mitigate the injustices inflicted on these nonhuman animals, it is necessary to restore their autonomy if we are to pay more than lip service to their dignity."

Happy is a 52-year-old Asian elephant who has spent most of her life in captivity. Born in Thailand in 1971, in the early 1970s Happy and six other young elephants - likely her brothers, sisters, and cousins - were captured in the wild and imported into the US. Named after the Seven Dwarves, they were eventually separated and sold to circuses and zoos across the country.

The Bronx Zoo ultimately acquired Happy and Grumpy, where they lived together for nearly two decades. After the pair was placed into an enclosure with two other elephants, Grumpy sustained serious injuries when Patty and Maxine attacked her. Grumpy was subsequently euthanized, and the zoo separated Happy from the other elephants. She's been imprisoned at the Bronx Zoo for forty-five years, and kept in isolation for more than half of this time. (Saddling her with the uber-ironic name "Happy" just seems like icing on the cruelty cake.)

THING: INSIDE THE STRUGGLE FOR ANIMAL PERSONHOOD details the Herculean efforts of the Nonhuman Animal Rights Project on behalf of Happy, and nonhuman animals like her: chiefly great apes, elephants, and cetaceans. Using the writ of habeas corpus, they hope to get Happy declared a legal person - because only people have rights. Steven Wise and the lawyers at the NhRP are backed by a large body of scientific evidence, which demonstrates that chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, elephants, and dolphins - among others - are self-aware (as demonstrated by the mirror recognition test) and capable of communication.

Within these pages, you'll meet Santino, a chimpanzee at the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden, who is so distressed by his living situation that he hides stones in anticipation of the zoo's opening and then uses them as weapons to drive visitors away. Then there's Kanzi, a bonobo at the Language Center at Georgia State University who learned to communicate using lexigrams and American Sign Language, which he taught to his family; they were able to communicate with their human caregivers using a mosaic of lexigrams, ASL, and pant-hoots. No doubt you've heard of Koko, a gorilla who mastered more than one thousand signs, and understood more than two thousand English words (and who famously raised a number of kittens, starting with a little gray and white kitten who she named All Ball). And, of course, there's Happy.

To say that Happy's life has been tragic is a gross understatement. She was just a baby when she was (no doubt violently) kidnapped from her family, taken from her homeland, and sold into captivity and servitude: made into a something instead of the someone she so clearly is. Her existence has been one of isolation, loss, deprivation, and solitude. Through their evocative, often bleak illustrations, Sam Machado and Cynthia Sousa Machado dare the reader not to empathize with Happy - and her brethren. Happy is an individual, capable of feeling love and grief, joy and suffering. She has - had - a family who loved her and no doubt mourned her loss. (Their likening of an elephant's brain to a vast library - with the loss of a herd's matriarch representing an incalculable loss - straight up gave me chills.) In all the ways that count, Happy (like so many nonhuman animals) is a person. In some ways, she may be more human(e) than many of us - those who would keep her jailed for our own entertainment and pleasure.

To date, the NhRP has largely been unsuccessful, thanks to an overwhelming interplay of factors - hundreds of years of legal precedent, thousands of years of human speciesism, animal agriculture lobbyists, and human indifference, to name just a few. Yet the battle for nonhuman rights is not without hope. The last decade has seen promising developments: in New Zealand, in which a longstanding conflict between the Māori and Parliament resulted in legal personhood for the Whanganui River; in India, where the Uttarakhand high court recognized several rivers and their glaciers as "legal persons" - and, a year later, declared that "the entire animal kingdom has rights equivalent to a person"; and in Argentina, where a judge ruled in 2015 that Sandra, an orangutan imprisoned in the Buenos Aires Zoo, was "a nonhuman person." (And in 2018, another Argentinian court used this precedent to free a chimpanzee named Cecilia. -- to name just a few examples.)

Hopefully this graphic novel - with its heartrending artwork and powerfully argued premise - will help to sway a few hearts and minds.

"Happy is more than a thing. In every way that counts, Happy is a person who deserves to be free."

My only complaint is perhaps the singular focus on self-awareness as opposed to sentience, an arguably much more important consideration in the argument for animal rights. (In the words of Jeremy Bentham, “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?”)

While this simply reflects the NhRP's legal strategy, and I understand its use as tactic - a foot in the door, so to speak, or beginning with the low-hanging fruit - I was a bit unsettled by how the narrative brushed off concerns from animal agriculture lobbyists that granting Happy personhood would, say, make beef and dairy illegal. To wit: Argentina's beef industry has only ballooned in the years since Sandra gained legal rights and was relocated to an animal sanctuary. There's really no acknowledgment that, say, bovines are also beings capable of experiencing emotions, forming friendships and family bonds, and suffering untold agonies in the animal agriculture industry - and that confining, torturing, and killing them by the hundreds of millions annually is unconscionable. Perhaps Happy's personhood should throw the legal status of farmed animal into question as well.… (meer)