An Elephant is now a Person?

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen

I never thought that by the time I turned sixty, I would be writing about the foolishness of people who want personhood status for animals. It happened. It made a bit of sense when some activists failed in their attempt to obtain legal status for a chimpanzee since they resemble humans somewhat. But an elephant?

Credit: RGBStock / Stella Bogdanic

Just over an hour south of me at the Bronx Zoo is an elephant named Happy. Animal rights extremists are unhappy and want the elephant to have personhood status. Let's ride this short side trail a spell. A woman was a vegetarian for many years, but ate a hamburger and was converted. Now she's a butcher and a pig farmer. She did the vegetarian thing because she was converted by reading a book by "bioethicist" Peter Singer. That name should get the attention of some people, as he is known for animal rights, but also abortion and infanticide. Don't eat meat because animals have rights, but kill your unborn child who is not a person. Yeah, makes perfect sense. Okay, back to the original trail we were riding.

We should talk about the elephant in the room (heh!), namely, where rights come from in the first place.

Rights are not the product of simple assertions or declarations, or even wishing very, very hard. While governments may grant some people certain rights, those rights ultimately come from God our Creator — a fact that America's founding fathers recognized from the get-go. We are created in God's image, not the product of particles-to-pachyderm evolution. If evolution were true and we were all biologically related, would granting rights make sense then? That'll be the day! To be consistent, evolutionists should say that we crawled up to the top of the food chain, so we're in charge now and we do what we see fit in order to improve our survivability and pleasure.

The story that inspired this short article came from Dr. Mohler. He has some very important insights to offer, and I'd be much obliged if you would give it a listen or read the transcript. To do that, just click on "Happy the Elephant Goes to Court: Lawyers Argue that a Bronx Zoo Elephant Is a Person Just Like You and Me".

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