"No Orangutan Writ of Habeas Corpus"/ "Orangutan Declared a 'Person' by Argentine Court"

The PETA article presented an interesting story about Sandra the orangutan. The orangutan may have been called a person but she was never called human. Since the article was written by PETA it was very biased. The whole purpose of the article was to have people feel emotion then in bold at the bottom have a what can we do section, in hopes that this article would inspire people to want to make a change. They ultimately want the release of animals in captivity, and need donations; it was a good use of pathos and then visual rhetoric.

In the "No Orangutan Writ of Habeas Corpus" article, the rhetor is Wesley J. Smith. While reading the article I was questioning Smiths’ credibility. I did some further research into that and found out that his Human Exceptionalism blog, hosted by National Review, is one of the premier blogs dealing with human life and dignity.  If you know that about him, then he has situated ethos. This article was really brief and was in defense of human exceptionalism that would have been threatened if Sandra had been declared a human. This article was for a very specific audience, the people who already read his blog.

I think animals have the right to be treated fairly however, having them declared as people, may be taking things too far. If giving them “person” status allows them to be released from captivity then I may be more easily convinced that an animal should be considered a person. However, either of these articles did a good job of convincing me of either side of their argument. In relation to the SeaWorld case mentioned in both articles, since refereeing to the animals as slaves was unsuccessful, maybe they need to come up with term equivalent to that but only to be used when refereeing to animals.