Canadian and U.S. animal-rights activists are applauding an Argentine court’s decision this month to grant a form of “non-human personhood” to a 29-year-old Sumatran orangutan named Sandra — believed to be the first-ever ruling of its kind.

“Sandra will now be a lightning rod for all animals,” said Barbara Cartwright, CEO of the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies. “It’s another turning point in recognizing animals as having a level of rights.”

Some animal-rights supporters predict the precedent-setting ruling, which could still be overturned on appeal, is likely to spark thousands of similar court cases in other parts of the world.

“Following a dynamic judicial interpretation … it is necessary to recognize that the animal is subject to rights because non-human subjects (animals) are holders of rights and should be protected,” said the three-member tribunal in a brief one-page decision that did not go into great detail about the court’s reasoning.

The Argentine case follows an unsuccessful bid in upstate New York this fall to have personhood status conferred upon Tommy, a 26-year-old chimpanzee recently retired from the circus and now the pet of a trailer-park operator named Patrick Lavery.

In the New York case, the court denied a writ of habeas corpus sought on behalf of the chimp, arguing the animal was not legally a “person” because he cannot honour a system of rights and duties, as an average human can.

The New York case was spearheaded by The Nonhuman Rights Project, brainchild of U.S. lawyer Steven Wise.

The Argentine judges rendered a very different verdict, clearing the way for Sandra to be removed from the Buenos Aires zoo, her home for two decades, and relocated to an animal sanctuary in Brazil, where she could dwell in something closer to freedom.

“This is a historic measure,” said animal-rights lawyer Pablo Buompadre, according to a report in La Nacion, a Buenos Aires newspaper. “It constitutes a blow to the spinal column of the Argentine legal system, whose civil standards define animals as things, and it opens a way not only for great apes but also for other sentient beings that find themselves unjustly and arbitrarily deprived of freedom in zoos, circuses, aquatic parks and experimental laboratories.”

Supporters of animal rights cheered the Argentine ruling.

“We certainly do support this decision,” said Matthew Rice, director of investigations for Mercy for Animals, a U.S.-based group. “Apes are very closely related to humans.”

Orangutans, for example, share 97 per cent of their DNA with humans, and they are not even our closest relatives.

Both humans and orangutans belong to the Hominidae family, — meaning Great Apes — along with gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Bonobos and chimpanzees are Homo sapiens’ nearest evolutionary neighbours, sharing 98.6 per cent of their genetic material in common with humans.

In addition to setting a worldwide legal precedent — albeit a non-binding one — the Argentine verdict inevitably raises a tangle of ethical and biological questions.

Many who defend the Argentine decision base their arguments partly on genetics and partly on intelligence. The intellectual ability of mature chimpanzees, for example, is roughly equivalent to that of a human toddler, except in the area of social cognition — the ability to learn from others — where the apes lag far behind.

Others say that, if intelligence is to be a criterion for personhood, then genetics shouldn’t be a factor at all.

“Pigs are better at memory games than chimpanzees,” said Rice. “A lot of animals have very sophisticated levels of cognition.”

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And the debate doesn’t stop there. According to Cartwright, roughly 650 million animals a year are slaughtered for human consumption in Canada alone, many of them after living in miserable conditions on factory farms. She believes their plight is just as worthy of legal recognition as that of Sandra, the orangutan in Argentina. Others agree.

“The question is not ‘Can they reason?’ or ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’” said Barry MacKay, director of the Animal Alliance of Canada. “That to me is the ultimate question.”