Heck maybe their right , giving animals rights and making sure the defective ones can reproduce by helping them to live might be the best way to kill them off, however it is a bit slow……not to mention expensive. Before we know it we’ll have dolphins born with a single flipper fitted with a prosthetic flipper and giving birth to several just like it and then they can do the same over and over spreading their defects(and others as well). What think it can’t happen? We proved perfectly well that it can. We proved with ourselves, and it only took a couple hundred years or so. With dolphins being so few in number compared to humans we should be able to screw up their gene pool in much less time.

PLATYPUSES FTW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LOL

The fact is almost every animal is vicious and heartless to some degree and if it came down to them VS. us they wouldn’t hesitate to throw us under the bus(or boat in the case of dolphins).

It has always been survival of the fittest, those that can change, adapt and control their habitat the best survive  and thrive, the others fall behind further and further depending on how well they adapt.

Many animals kill other species for food and their own kind for fun or revenge just like humans. I see no reason to spend the billions of dollars it would take to give them some level of human rights as long as they act like us, we spend enough dealing with our own violence(Don’t believe it would cost billions? Just think how much more we would be required to spend to clean up their habitat than we do now, not to mention the increased cost of policing humans who still try to kill them).

And when they kill or rape for fun do we treat them like humans and lock them up or give them the death penalty like we do humans? or do they get the benefits without having the responsibility? It would be the latter. So if they are deserving of humans rights and are allowed to do these things why can’t humans, who are just animals after all, get away with it too?

Let us worry about our own and just be as nice as we can to other species without getting all retarded about “human rights” . We should and do kill the animals we need for food but should mostly leave the non food animals alone.

Now I’m not bashing you by any means. I see you mostly, if not completely disagree with giving them rights. I simply replied to your post because you mentions the need to give very specific set of criteria. This is really a post to all those that favor doing something this retarded and expensive.

Cove Guardians get HKairlines to bring an end of transport of live dolphins:
http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/2012/02/29/hong-kong-airlines-bans-transport-of-wild-animals-1348

And where did you get this jump to an archaic specification of the ‘natural rights’  framework, anyway?

They acquire human knowledge and rebel, leading to a global war for supremacy.
 
On August 27, 1935, Čapek wrote, “Today I completed the last chapter of my utopian novel.
 
He describes the initial thought of the novel as, “you mustn’t think that the evolution that gave rise to our form of life was the only evolutionary process on the planet.”

I was diving off Korea in 1982 and met up with a pod of white-sided dolphins. The were very interested in everything we were doing in while underwater and several would take turns tagging along. I was placing technical objects on the seafloor. After I had placed my last set, I was heading back for recovery and one of those guys snagged a sensor and brought it back to me! I was surprised as hell.  It took me 30 minutes to go back down the line and to see which one he’d removed it. I was afraid the others would join in on the fun and make the task impossible.

Don’t fuck with dolphins. Let them live and enjoy their lives.

But this will decimate my people’s proud tradition of the annual corporation hunt!

When that starts happening with pigs and dogs, I will stop eating them.

Notice I used the term “other animals” so as to denote between every species on the planet and the one species on two legs that believes itself superior to all the others. 

By the slippery slope logic of your argument, the GLBT community shouldn’t be given equal marriage rights because it sets a dangerous precedent for people who want to marry their siblings, offspring or My Little Pony collection…

How about indigenous use and concepts about animal worlds? Should we ban that as well because your law says that animals are persons?

How about indigenous concepts about women? Should we allow female infanticide because some cultures prefer boys?

Policing is a different question; even with people we usually trust different communities or jurisdictions to take care of themselves. When there are massive violations going on, you can put pressure on them or might even step in, but for ordinary crimes it doesn’t always work well.

Trying to apply the same logic to dolphins and chimps: if you found a male trying to rape a female you wouldn’t hunt him down and bring him to trial, but if you knew what you were doing you could chase him away. If one group were trying to wipe out another, you might take steps to preserve them.

And of course your main responsibility is making sure you don’t attack them. Rights equal to humans or not, this doesn’t sound like it’s too unreasonable an approach to me.

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=2769 
http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/WattsChanner_Bulk_Food.pdf

/walks away, whistling

One of the advantages of giving rights to corporations is that some of them are rich and can afford lawyers. A population that has legal rights but can’t afford lawyers isn’t going to be able to realize all of those rights.

If we do extend such a privilege it certainly shouldn’t go to any non endangered breed of dolphin. They are violent serial rapists who have been known to gang up and torture other sea life simply for fun. We tend to overlook all that because they are cute and occasionally do a backflip without prompting in the wild. 

Sharks and whales, fine. Skates, rays and eels? Awesome. Dolphins are malignant evil in a cute outfit though.

I believe it to be an important issue, not focusing on categorizing a group of living beings as a unit to or not to be exploited, as it leads to that wicked rationalization which at its extremes can be applied to other humans as well – as history shows us.