 Is that the chimpanzee's trying to call? Or is that the hippopotamuses? So I was on the internet last night and an article popped up and I'm like, is this some type of joke? Like, is this true? Are they messing with me here? And then I clicked into the article, turns out this is true. It says Pablo Escobar's cocaine hippos are legally people? Are US court rules like legally recognized as persons? That's a huge, this is huge. Like when you think about the implications of this huge for animal rights. Now, before we go into this article, the first time I heard about this was years ago. There was this group, the non-human animal rights project. They've been trying to get chimps the rights of personhood for years. This is 2015. On Monday, New York judge appeared to grant two chimpanzees a writ of happiest corpus. In other words, the chimps have the right to a day in court. A writ of happiest corpus, probably brutalizing the pronunciation as normal, happiest corpus is an act of parliament still enforced today, which ensures that no one can be imprisoned unlawfully. Wow, in 2015, Magna Carta stated that no one could be imprisoned unlawfully. Okay, okay. So maybe this is what they're trying to enact here. Magna Carta, that's old. That's old, 12, 15. God, that's older than my grandma even. After a kerfuffle of the implications of applying happiest corpus to a chimp, the judge on Tuesday struck those words from her order. The chimps still get representation in court, but their personhood is not up for debate at the moment. So I don't think they succeeded. Pablo Escobar, a drug lord, a violent drug lord, multi-billionaire, became one of the richest men in the world during the 80s due to his drug trafficking empire. Purchased a variety of exotic animals for his Hacienda, Napolis, Saranch in Columbia, just brutalized that pronunciation once again. After he was shot dead by police in 1993, giraffes, zebras, and flamingos were sent off to zoos, but four giant hippos, one male and three females, were allowed to remain in a pond. And we all know what that male did with the three females. He got cheeky with it, didn't he? Naughty, naughty hippos, instead of hungry, hungry hippos. So the so-called cocaine hippos have since multiplied to up to 100. They've been busy. They've been so busy. Busy potomuses, that's for sure. The largest herd outside Africa and could reach 1,500 by 2040, wow. So what's the problem with that? Well, they are destroying the local ecosystem and have become an increasing menace and are responsible for attacks on local fishermen. Well, interesting, because the fishermen are actually attacking the fish. And you wanna be part of nature and catch all the fish, but you're upset when it happens back to you from the hippos. But what they've been doing, oh, there's a horrible photo here. They've shot down this hippopotamus, which is really sad. So what happened is the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the ALDF, who the ALDF? Animal Legal Defense Fund is an animal law advocacy organization. It stated its mission is to protect the lives and advance the interests of animals through the legal system. Wow, ALDF, legendary. Okay, let's keep going. The ALDF, a US charity, has argued for the use instead of another contraceptive called PZP, which it says has historical success with hippos in captivity. So I think what they wanna do here is they want to cull these hippopotamuses. And the ALDF don't want that to happen. They wanna try a contraceptive instead. There's an ongoing court case in Columbia, which the hippos are the plaintiffs. Wow, the hippos are the plaintiffs. I wonder if they have little hippo suit and ties for them. But that is, that's amazing. There's animals actually having a proper day in court. Columbia accepts that animals have the right to bring cases to protect their interests. Wow, this has crazy implications for farm, imagine if, see, there's always this, the thing is with farmed animals, there's always this like loophole where they're like, well, like these welfare rights apply to dogs and cats and hippos and monkeys, but like the farmed animals have this exclusion, like treat them however you want their food animals. So I mean, I'm always hesitant to be like, could this extrapolate out to other non-human animals? Like imagine if this is like one of my dreams, imagine if we got personhood for a pig or the species of pigs that are exploited and killed for their bodies, that would be huge. That would be huge. They instantly couldn't exploit them and kill them. They'd have to phase it in or something because that would have crazy implications for animal agriculture, animal, proper animal rights. Columbia accepts that animals have the right to bring cases to protect their interests. Wow, I mean, how many other animals in Columbia can bring their case forward? This is crazy. The ALDF wants to bring evidence on the hippo's behalf from two experts in non-surgical animal sterilization, but the experts are based in Ohio in the US. So the ALDF are actually acting on behalf of the hippos. They're the hippo's lawyers basically, that is so good. So a spokesman for the ALDF said, in granting the application, the court recognized the hippos as legal persons. So they granted the application and now the hippopotamuses are recognized as hippo people. How's that? Stephen Wells, who's Stephen Wells? How you going, Stephen? ALDF executive director said, the court's order authorizing the hippos to exercise their legal right to obtain information in the United States is a critical milestone in the broader animal status fight to recognize that animals have enforceable rights. It's because the court order authorized the hippos to exercise their legal right to obtain information in the United States. So they had enforceable rights in the United States. Am I misreading this? Cause I'm not a law expert, by the way, but he added, animals have the right to be free from cruelty and exploitation and the failure of US courts to recognize their rights in other cases impedes the ability to enforce existing legislative protections in the US animals are legally regarded as property. That's correct. That's why, because they're legally regarded as property, especially farm animals, their owner can do what they want with their property, which is why animal rights are so important because how can you protect the interests of a being if they're considered property, like someone's table? If I wanna chuck my table in the dump, smash it up, then why can't I? If I wanna shoot my property in the head and eat them, why can't I, it's my property, you know what I mean? So this is why taking the property status away from animals would have irreversible effects on animal rights. As soon as you recognize farm animals as non-human persons, their rights are protected legally, which is huge. Next year, the New York Court of Appeals expected to hear a potentially landmark case brought by animal rights activists over happy an elephant that lives in the Bronx Zoo. Wow. So these activists are attempting to use a writ of habeas corpus from the Magna Carta, you know, we talked about it before that, you know, people cannot be imprisoned unlawfully, usually used in relation to human prisoners to have happy removed from the zoo. Now that they've won with the hippos here and the hippos are like people and they can protect their interests, their rights and they're fighting to not have them be culled and instead have them use a contraceptive to stop them from breeding, which is, you know, I think it's a better alternative than just culling them off, which is just a mass slaughter of hippopotamuses. This is amazing. This is amazing. Now the implications of this, like animals in zoos, imagine that they could free them, give them rights, then this could actually leak over into farmed animals in theory. In practice, it might be a bit harder, but imagine if you could just get rights for one pig like that pig was recognized as a little piggy person, a little non-human people. This is the implications that animal rights has on animal agriculture and animal exploitation. It is the greatest enemy to animal exploitation as legal rights for animals. So what do you guys think down in the comments below? Any lawyers in the comments below that wanna help me analyze this case further in the comments, leave your opinion down there. ALDF, wow, amazing. This is a huge win. Although I don't know how far this can be stretched. I don't really know the implications of this whether it could just be used on these hippopotamuses. Can it be used on hippopotamuses in other countries? Can it be used on other species? We'll have to wait and see. But imagine that they've just opened up the floodgates to start representing animals in court. Could this be where we need to focus our attention in the courts fighting for personhood for the animals? Amazing. Comment down below, like the video and we'll see you in the next video.