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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Strange news stories come along at all times of year, but it seems like Argentina was holding this one back to try to steal the title of the year's strangest tale, after it was revealed that a court in the nation has given a ruling that an orangutan should be considered a 'non-human person'.<\/p>\n
The great ape, named Sandra, has lived all of her life in a zoo, but after years of campaigning from animal rights groups, it was decided that her intelligence means she should not be held in captivity. The courts ruled that she is a person and not an 'it', which means she has to be released from the zoo as keeping her locked up would be illegal. <\/p>\n
Members of the Association of Officials and Lawyers for Animal Rights (Afada) have been campaigning for years to have the 29-year old orangutan released from Buenos Aires Zoo, and in the landmark case, they won after Sandra was awarded basic human rights. <\/p>\n
The zoo now has ten days to appeal against the decision, which would see it forced to release the great ape if it lost. Experts say the case could open the floodgates for hundreds of new cases in which animals may be considered too intelligent to be living in captivity. <\/p>\n
However, they have also warned that it could be potentially dangerous to compare an animal to a human when its true intelligence is unknown. <\/p>\n
"When you don’t know the biology of a species, to unjustifiably claim it suffers abuse, is stressed or depressed, is to make one of man’s most common mistakes, which is to humanise animal behaviour," said head of biology Adrian Sestelo.<\/p>\n
However, Afada lawyer Paul Buompadre told Argentina’s La Nacion newspaper: "This opens the way not only for other great apes, but also for other sentient beings which are unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in zoos, circuses, water parks and scientific laboratories."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An orangutan named Sandra has been awarded the status thanks to her intelligence. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n