Should Dolphins Have Legal Rights?
Biologists say that dolphins are the world’s second most intelligent creatures (after human beings), and some dolphin advocates say that they should even be give legal rights as “non-human persons.” On this week’s Revelations, William Henry’s guest agrees with this. Is this one of the trends we will see in the future?
These people say that it is morally wrong to keep them in amusement parks or kill them (along with whales, who also seem to be conscious beings) for food. Almost 300,000 whales and dolphins die in this way every year. In the Times on Line website, Jonathan Leake quotes zoologist Lori Marino as saying, “Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size.”
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