NY court asked to determine if chimp is legally a person

Should a chimpanzee be treated as a person with legal rights?

This is the lead line on an article from the AP, as reported on msn.com.  

It's also is an update to something I wrote 2 years ago, in April 2015 - A chimpanzee is the equivalent of a human child?

My conclusion from the first article is -

Makes me wonder – is the real goal to save the chimps – or is it to degrade people?

This one makes me wonder even more about that as the real goal here.

This is the context to which the opening question applies -

Should a chimpanzee be treated as a person with legal rights?

That's what attorney Steven Wise will try to convince a state appeals court in Manhattan of on Thursday. Wise, who represents the Florida-based Nonhuman Rights Project animal advocacy group, plans to argue that two chimps named Tommy and Kiko should be freed from cages to live in an outdoor sanctuary.

Wise has been trying for years, unsuccessfully, to get courts to grant the chimps habeas corpus in order to, he says, free them from unlawful imprisonment.

He says the apes, which will not appear in court, deserve a better quality of life. If the court agrees, they would be sent to live with others of their species on one of 13 islands amid a lake in Fort Pierce, Florida, that comprise the Save the Chimps sanctuary.

I'm a dog person.  Friends have told my wife and I (jokingly) that if reincarnation is true (which I'm definitely saying it is not) - they want to come back as one of our dogs.  If you've read much of my stuff, you know I've also compared our dogs' relationship to us with our relationship with God.

However, having said that and knowing just how much I care about my "family" of four legged "kids" - I would never ever say they are the equivalent of a human child or that they have human rights.

If you remember (or even if you don't) - here's what Genesis has to say about when God created dogs - and other land based animals.

Ge 1:24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Notice what it says there at the end - God saw that it was good.

To give you an idea of the meaning behind the original Hebrew word translated as "good" - here it is -

טֹוב 
good, pleasant, agreeable. 1A pleasant, agreeable (to the senses). 1B pleasant (to the higher nature). 1C good, excellent (of its kind). 1D good, rich, valuable in estimation. 1E good, appropriate, becoming. ¹Strong, J. (1995). Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon. Woodside Bible Fellowship.

Let's compare that with the account of when man was created -

Ge 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, ...”
Ge 1:27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
...
Ge 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

We'll get to the "..." in a moment.  And, while it's a rather longer passage for the segment on creating man, as compared to creating the land based animals, the only addition to what was already created was man.  And then it was very good.  Even if one were to consider the sum total of all creations as very good, as compared to what came prior to man as good - and it was the completion of creation that was required for "very good" to be used - the difference is still man.  And, man, as the culmination - as God's most prized creation - was last.

That's one huge difference there.  As with the land animals, everything else God created ended with it was good.  But after creating man, it was very good.

Going back to the original Hebrew again, the word for "good" is the same in both verses.  It's the addition of the word very that provides the distinction.  Looking at it's meaning, we see -

מְאֹד
1 exceedingly, much subst. 2 might, force, abundance. 3 muchness, force, abundance, exceedingly. 3A force, might. 3B exceedingly, greatly, very (idioms showing magnitude or degree). 3B1 exceedingly. 3B2 up to abundance, to a great degree, exceedingly. 3B3 with muchness, muchness.  ²Strong, J. (1995). Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon. Woodside Bible Fellowship.