The Nonhuman Rights Project is leading this charge. Having failed to win personhood for chimpanzees — alarmingly, the idea gained support from one high court judge — it is now pursuing a case in New York to determine whether "Happy," an elephant at the Bronx Zoo, should be granted a writ of habeas corpus. (Ponder the surreality of those words!) From The Guardian story:
Lawyers representing an elephant have argued in a New York City court that their trunked client be considered a person, in a fresh attempt to upend human dominance over this designation.
Happy the elephant is, contrary to her sunny name, being detained by the Bronx Zoo "illegally", due to her personhood, and must be released, according to the pachyderm's self-appointed legal team.
The case's instigator, an animal rights group, hopes it will cause a legal breakthrough that will elevate the status of elephants, which the group calls "extraordinarily complex creatures" similar to humans that should have the fundamental right to liberty.
Comment: Animals do not - and cannot - have rights. Groups like PETA are trying to piggyback a radical ideology on the very real and valid concern for animal welfare. But consider what they actually want. If animals have rights - like humans - then anyone who kills an animal for food could be charged with murder. Anyone who eats meat could be charged with the equivalent of cannibalism. Pet ownership and animal husbandry would be the equivalent of slavery, and calling someone a damn dirty dog would be hate speech. Training dogs to sniff out drugs and diseases would also be questionable: did the dogs choose to be trained in such professions?
The ideology is absurd and dangerous, but as with so many other facets of the hyper-liberal agenda, speaking out against it makes you an easy target, as if by denying animal rights you are arguing in favor of torturing animals and mistreating them in various ways. Just as countering far-left talking points can leave you vulnerable to accusations of sexism, racism, transphobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, etc.