Austrian court won't delare chimp to be a person

About six months ago, I commented on a court case in Austria in which the court was to rule if a chimpanzee is entitled to "human personhood" or not. Well, the court dismissed the case earlier this week, which is good news to anyone opposed to such lunacy. The plaintiffs have said they will appeal the dismissal to the Austrian supreme court, but hopefully sanity will win out yet again and they will also dismiss this farce. Although I'm an American and this case was in Europe, I watched it closely because of the chance that is could set a very bad precedent, that could, sometime down the road, have ramifications elsewhere. It's nice to see that the judge here decided to use judicial restraint here, instead of engaging in legislation and social engineering from the bench, which seems to be all too common these days, both here in the USA and abroad.

Study: Human toddlers smarter than chimps. Well, duh!

A new study seems to have confirmed what most of us, save for perhaps some in the AR community, have suspected all along: human children are smarter than chimps. The study found that human children at 2 years of age have superior social cognitive skills to apes. ARAs sometimes will use the fact that some scientists claim that humans and chimps share so much genetically that the two should, in fact both be classified in the same genus, or even the same species, as a transparent, feeble attempt to justify "personhood" for chimps. Such an opinion is in the scientific minority however, because genetic similarities are not the only criterion used in determining taxonomic classification. It also involves other factors such as anatomical/physiological similarities, as well as behavioral/social similarities, and in those respects, humans and chimps are obviously quite different. This study seems to help confirm that fact. Well, there you have it: two year olds are smarter than chimpanzees. But what about PeTA members or ALF thugs vs. chimps? That comparison hasn't been made yet. My money would be on the chimps.