Vote for Prop 12 (California’s ban on extreme confinement). Buy cage-free eggs. Support the Better Chicken Commitment. This path accepts that we are omnivores but insists on cruelty reduction. It is pragmatic, actionable, and slow.
The rights movement is currently focused on habeas corpus. The Happy the Elephant case was an attempt to change her status from "thing" to "person" (not human person, but legal person with the right to bodily liberty). While it failed, similar cases have succeeded in habeas corpus hearings for chimpanzees in New York. Vote for Prop 12 (California’s ban on extreme confinement)
In the summer of 2021, a federal court in the United States ruled that "Happy," a 47-year-old Asian elephant at the Bronx Zoo, was not legally a person. To the average passerby, this seems like common sense. But to the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) who filed the suit, the decision was a devastating blow to a burgeoning legal movement. Happy, they argued, is a cognitively complex being who recognizes herself in a mirror, forms deep social bonds, and grieves for her dead. Why, they asked, should her freedom be any less protected than a human’s? This path accepts that we are omnivores but