Over at TreeHugger there's a story about scientists who are arguing that dolphins should qualify for moral rights as "non-human persons" because...
Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University, has used MRI scans to show that dolphins are incredibly intelligent. That might not sound like news. But what the MRI scans seem to reveal is that after comparison with primate brains, dolphins seem to be even more intelligent than chimpanzees.And if that's the case, Marino concludes we should give dolphins the same status as humans.I'm all for a serious discussion about extending real rights of personhood to creatures other than humans (though I'm a little nervous about making intelligence or MRI results the criteria).