I mean, I didn't even know you were on YouTube, so no, I'd never watched it. (And if you had posted it here, well, it happens to fall under two categories of things I tend to ignore on here: real-life animals, and embedded/linked video essays.)
Most people are familiar with Alex and especially Koko. However, the academic rigor behind their training is undeniably lacking, with Koko's caregiver's publications in particular being criticized for the influence of the handlers on both the elicitation of the signage and the interpretation of what she was communicating. (Look into Nim Chimpsky for a great example of how this can happen, or Clever Hans for a famous one.) Alex's caretaker stopped short of calling his communication and vocabulary language, and as far as I know, there hasn't been any publication referring to Chaser's vocabulary as anything more incredible than working memory. But any one of these animals could publish an epic novel in perfect Cantonese and it wouldn't mean these skills, or any legal status argued on the basis of them, could be generalized to all animals or even all members of their species.
It's more a case of humans are persons and there's been an assumption that other animals are just not.
You seem to think this is an arbitrary distinction, but ultimately the point of legal personhood is anthropocentric - it's about managing our own concern with ourselves, how we relate to each other. This is why there are legal persons who don't have language or that aren't even human at all. You agree above that it "doesn't make sense" to subject birds to the same restrictions humans are subject to, but fail to realize that the exclusion of birds from concern about these things is what we already have. Give animals "personhood", and we shuffle everything around to accommodate this, and in the end we still have to come up with a legal distinction between human and non-human animals.
And for what? What do you expect this will really accomplish for them? Clearly that they won't be allowed to be eaten or milked anymore, based on the fact this article makes more arguments about meat-eating than it does about animal personhood, but this seems like going the long way 'round.
There are other issues you haven't addressed here. When animal agriculture goes essentially immediately bankrupt because they have a huge cost of care for animals and now no income, are the cattle and chickens and what-have-you all going to become wards of the state to ensure their welfare? How will the sudden food crisis be managed? Will I have to get power of attorney over my cat to get her spayed, or if she needs to be euthanized? What is my cat going to eat? Are animal breeders going to run afoul of anti-eugenics laws?
I mean, I didn't even know you were on YouTube, so no, I'd never watched it. (And if you had posted it here, well, it happens to fall under two categories of things I tend to ignore on here: real-life animals, and embedded/linked video essays.)
Most people are familiar with Alex and especially Koko. However, the academic rigor behind their training is undeniably lacking, with Koko's caregiver's publications in particular being criticized for the influence of the handlers on both the elicitation of the signage and the interpretation of what she was communicating. (Look into Nim Chimpsky for a great example of how this can happen, or Clever Hans for a famous one.) Alex's caretaker stopped short of calling his communication and vocabulary language, and as far as I know, there hasn't been any publication referring to Chaser's vocabulary as anything more incredible than working memory. But any one of these animals could publish an epic novel in perfect Cantonese and it wouldn't mean these skills, or any legal status argued on the basis of them, could be generalized to all animals or even all members of their species.
You seem to think this is an arbitrary distinction, but ultimately the point of legal personhood is anthropocentric - it's about managing our own concern with ourselves, how we relate to each other. This is why there are legal persons who don't have language or that aren't even human at all. You agree above that it "doesn't make sense" to subject birds to the same restrictions humans are subject to, but fail to realize that the exclusion of birds from concern about these things is what we already have. Give animals "personhood", and we shuffle everything around to accommodate this, and in the end we still have to come up with a legal distinction between human and non-human animals.
And for what? What do you expect this will really accomplish for them? Clearly that they won't be allowed to be eaten or milked anymore, based on the fact this article makes more arguments about meat-eating than it does about animal personhood, but this seems like going the long way 'round.
There are other issues you haven't addressed here. When animal agriculture goes essentially immediately bankrupt because they have a huge cost of care for animals and now no income, are the cattle and chickens and what-have-you all going to become wards of the state to ensure their welfare? How will the sudden food crisis be managed? Will I have to get power of attorney over my cat to get her spayed, or if she needs to be euthanized? What is my cat going to eat? Are animal breeders going to run afoul of anti-eugenics laws?