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Parrots, apes, and elephants are people, too.

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Steven M. Wise, J.D., is the president of Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, and teaches Animal Rights Law at Harvard, Vermont, and John Marshall Law Schools. He has written a new book: Drawing the Line, which goes beyond his previous book Rattling the Cage in that he advocates legal rights even beyond the great apes to elephants, parrots, and dolphins. (But not dogs.)

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so in other words, personhood is determined by IQ? Isn't that a tricky concept?

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Does that mean we can exclude politicians from the law? ;)

'Course a monumental problem with this is we are learning exactly how tricky it is to measure IQ... granted I haven't read the book, but last I checked nearly all tests had drastic shortcomings.

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Actually IQ isn't mentioned anywhere on the site. The classical IQ test is way too culture-specific to me, but some different sort of criteria could be found I'm sure, if only some serious research would be done on the issue. Giving increasing rights to increasingly intelligent species seems an interesting thing (for a beginning?).

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Previous message is mine... the comp forgotten my previous login. :-P

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