No seriously, that's what they say: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-17116882


For me, animals have shown high levels of intelligence but I would argue that they aren't "people".

However, I think they deserve to be treated better than they are ......

I'd go along with this, and the great apes too actually.
What defines 'people'? Is it paying taxes?

Corrected

I guess whatever eejit political football you want to kick around at the time. What makes anyone think this lever of etymological tomfoolery will make any difference anyway?

Jon

Dolphins are more intelligent than some of the students I see everyday, and they're afforded all sorts of rights and claims and the freedom to breed.
Can't we repeal their rights and give some to the cetaceans?

I think I would support this, though by the sounds of things is this is agreed then there would never be any more testing with live Cetaceans, so any scientist who wished to study behaviour, language, etc. would have to do so in their natural environment. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just that it will be harder to conduct similar research to what they have done in the future...

Question:
What reasons are there not give them those rights?

When to comes down to it, probably yes. Though how you’d tax a dolphin is clearly something to be considered carefully; you’d get paid in fish.

Generally speaking, you have to do that anyway. There's not really much point studying animal behaviour when it's not in it's natural habitat as if you aren't, all you're studying is the animal's reaction to the strange environment you put it in. Now that is a valid thing to study in pure science terms but it's of little practical use. No serious behavioural study is done on higher-order animals in captivity any more, there's just not seen to be any value in it.


Well, they are mainly philosophical, but then so are the reason for giving them rights. The whole argument is entirely semantics IMO, since I rather doubt dolphins actually care whether they have what we call 'rights' or not. They probably care that we kill them (either accidentally or intentionally) and damage the places they live but the bare fact is we can stop all of that without getting into the nebulous issue of 'rights'. The fact is we should stop killing dolphins and polluting the sea because these are the right things to do, not because we've given dolphins as a species some rather abstract set of entitlements we can't even, in large parts, enforce among ourselves. Seriously, if we can't make human rights stick in the 21st century, would anyone seriously argue we could make rights for cetaceans stick either?

It's a way to gain publicity for an issue that is of genuine concern to a lot of people (i.e. the mistreatment of provably intelligent and generally benign lifeforms we share this planet with) but I personally don't think giving them 'rights' will solve anything worth a damn.

Jon

Simple, are they human? Answer No. Therefore they cannot qualify for human rights.
Whether you give certain animals more legal protections/rights is a different question.

Following this logic, isn't that a bit like saying 'Well, murder happens anyway, so what's the point in making it illegal?'



Indeed, they're not human so 'human' rights aren't an issue, however I think there's clearly a good case for cetaceans and great apes to be afforded the same set of rights that we (in most cases, but certainly not universally) enjoy.

Actually, no. It's more like.. well speeding maybe. We all know speeding is illegal, yet lots of people still speed. Why? Because they know they probably won't get caught. Some people get caught but on the whole the chances are slim. IMO, it will be much the same if we gave dolphins very high levels of legal protection. Someone has to enforce the law, or it's pointless. Murder gets enforced pretty well because we all recognise that murder is bad. Are you going to be able to convince someone whose culture has considered dolphin to be a food crop for centuries that what they are doing is actually murder? When they're thousands of miles away from our nice first world homes, and hundreds of miles from anyone who gives a damn? Good luck with that.

I'm all for regulation when it's valid but the bare fact is this is a case where regulation on it's own will have absolutely no effect. It's a purely ornamental gesture to state a regulation you have no way of enforcing.

What we can do is try to make the people who are killing dolphins think it's a better idea not to - by doing things like not buying the products made in dolphin unfriendly ways (and I don't just mean 'from bits of dead dolphin'). Regulation without enforcement is futile and regulation cannot work without the consent of those being regulated. Therefore the task at hand is to convince those who do cause harm to dolphins and whales that are other,better options. Giving cetaceans 'human rights' will have absolutely no effect on that either way.

I'm not against saving dolphins. I'm just against doing utterly futile things that have the pretence of saving dolphins while in fact not saving even one.

For the record, I'm peripherally involved in animal conservation. It is something I care about. But this is just gesture and pomp and I'd much rather people did something that actually might work.

Jon

It's not really at all like speeding - we're talking about the deliberate killing of an animal that's demonstrably an intelligent species. They just happen to be a different shape to us.
And there are ways of enforcing it, as you go on to say "by doing things like not buying the products made in dolphin unfriendly ways"; legislation can make that an enforceable policy if, internationally, there's the will to do it.
Yes, we'll never be able to stop a small island community who faced with a limited forage species from eating dolphin (although to be honest I'm not sure many do given the presence of dolphins suggest easier forage fish) but we can legislate against commercial fishing practices that harm the species.

I don't think this is necessarily pomp at all; I genuinely think it'd give future generations pause for thought about the way they regard the other species we share the planet with as being more than wallpaper for their entertainment. It sets a much needed foundation for our actions with regard to many other species.

Nowhere in the article does it say we should give dolphins human rights.

What it says is "same rights as humans".