#nonhuman persons

[bunderbye]

Have a little taste of my fav track which you can find on the CD I designed for @ryminzine !

🐢Ft: My girl Hazel🐢

🎶 Song: Answers left unsaid by Non-Human Persons 🎶

"Ma'am this is a Rymin zine why did you draw Hazel?"

"Yes"

[loe-boi]

You know what, fuck you! I'm canonizing blaseball in lancer rpg, NHPs have a pass time and it's dumb splorts.

[derangedhyena-delphinidae]

Dear everyone, This isn't meant to come across dickishly but it very well might. If it does, I'm truly sorry, but I want to inform fellow whalebloggers of a word you may want in your vocabulary if you want to set cetaceans on the 'nonhuman persons' tier reliably and concisely. People often refer to whales as 'sentient.' Sentience is literally the ability to feel and perceive the world. Whales and dolphins are obviously sentient, but if we want to argue semantics technically everything with a functioning nervous system above a certain level of complexity is also sentient. It doesn't do much to set them apart. (I realise this is intentional and part of a normal dialogue for those who are vegan and very hardline on their animal rights stances. That's perfectly cool.)  A better word to discuss the enhanced cognitive properties of cetaceans, especially the advanced ones, is sapience. Cetaceans are sapient beings, sapience being 'the ability to act with wisdom' -- aka rather than just behave on an animal level with relatively simple responses and instincts, they instead can act with great purpose and intelligence indicative of strong abilities to reason and draw on the breadth of past experience and cultural knowledge. (In common parlance sapience/sapient is associated with humans/humanity, but in philosophical/cognitive and speculative fiction discussions it's frequently used the way I'm describing.)  I'm NOT saying it's incorrect to use "sentient" the way it commonly is - it's perfectly fine! It's an 'all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares' bit, all sapient creatures are sentient but not all sentient creatures are considered sapient. (Metacognition is commonly considered a necessity for sapience, and many animals don't show signs of metacognitive thought. The "nonhuman rights" candidates overwhelmingly tend to, though.) Sapient is simply a more specific word that helps to sharpen the focus of discussion. I just wanted to throw that out there, since I don't often see it used in cetacean discussions, but I feel like it should be. It's a good way to stealth-hamstring the oft-abused "whales are like big domestic animals" nonsense, inherently placing them on a different tier as a statement, rather than on a pivot to be argued. /shrug

[aljazeeraamerica-blog]

Should a chimpanzee be recognized as a 'legal person'? Tune in to Consider This at 10p ET/7p PT for the story.