Last week, an animal rights group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project filed lawsuits in three New York counties in an attempt to get judges to declare that chimpanzees are “legal persons” and free them from captivity. The suits are the opening salvo in a coordinated effort to grant legal personhood to a variety of animals across the United States.

On Friday, I moderated a live video chat for Science with two experts on opposite sides of this very contentious issue. One, Steven Wise, is the president of the NonHuman Rights Project and a vocal proponent of animal rights. The other, Richard Cupp, is a law professor at Pepperdine University in California and an influential voice in the anti-personhood movement. Both care about animals, but they have very different ideas of the best way to improve their welfare. Our chat was wide ranging–covering everything from what rights for animals would look like to whether Neanderthals, computers, and space aliens should be granted human rights. It was a fascinating and passionate discussion. I hope you’ll check it out!

“Dogs Are People, Too”. So ran the headline of a New York Times op-ed over the weekend. The piece, written by Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns, argued that because dogs experience some of the same emotions we do (as evinced by some preliminary MRI studies Burns and a friend carried out on canine brain activity), they should be granted rights and “a sort of limited personhood”. The National Review shot back with its own editorial, arguing that personhood for dogs is a threat to human exceptionalism and that it would effectively turn pets into slaves.

What exactly is pet personhood, and how could it impact the relationship between you and your cat or dog? I cover this topic in my new book, CITIZEN CANINE: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, to be published this spring by PublicAffairs. In the meantime, here’s everything you need to know:

What is the current legal status of pets?

We may view our cats and dogs as friends, family, and even virtual children, but that’s not how the law sees them. Ever since the early 1900s, American pets have had the legal status of property. That means that, in the eyes of the law, they are technically no different than a couch or a toaster. This status itself is an upgrade. Prior to the twentieth century, cats and dogs were considered valueless objects that didn’t even warrant the meager legal designation of property. They could be stolen and killed without repercussion.

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Shelter in the storm. Dixon Correctional’s outdoor emergency shelter can house up to 250 dogs and 100 cats. (Credit: Dixon Correctional Institute)

This article first appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of The Bark

Drive a ways along a narrow country road thirty miles north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the late summer morning filtering through the leaves as you pass acres of cow pasture and a few small churches, and you’ll come across a white picket fence leading to the last thing you’d expect to find here: a medium-security prison. First comes the octagonal guard tower, peeking over the trees, then the block brick buildings and drab exercise yards, enclosed by chain-link fencing topped with curly razor wire, 15 feet high. You’ve reached the Dixon Correctional Institute, home to 1600 inmates whiling away everything from a few years to life. That’s where I found myself in early September 2012. I hadn’t come to visit the inmates. I’d come to see the cats and dogs inside.

Seven years ago, when Hurricane Katrina barreled down on the GulfCoast, hundreds of thousands of residents fled their homes, leaving their pets behind. Most weren’t being cruel—they left food and water, assuming they’d be back in a few days, as they had after previous storms. They didn’t realize that Katrina and the floods that followed would decimate the region, demolishing homes, killing hundreds, and drowning a city. Fortunately, animal rescuers poured in from around the country, saving thousands of dogs on roofs, cats in attics, and pets wandering homeless on the streets. They trucked them to emergency shelters throughout the area, including a massive triage operation that had been set up at the Lamar-DixonExpoCenter in Gonzales, Louisiana, sixty miles northwest of New Orleans. The facility—a venue for livestock shows, horse exhibitions, and rodeos—would become the epicenter of the largest animal rescue operation in U.S. history, staffed with hundreds of volunteers and veterinarians caring for more than 8,000 animals salvaged from the storm. But as the weeks wore on, Lamar-Dixon began to overflow. There was no space left to shelter the cats and dogs. They sat in cages in parking lots. Thousands were in danger of becoming lost or dying.

That’s when Jimmy LeBlanc got on the phone. Dixon Correctional’s warden, LeBlanc had recently lost his 17-year-old Yorkshire Terrier, and he wanted to do something good for pets. He offered the Humane Society of the United States, which was running Lamar-Dixon at the time, some of the prison’s real estate. HSUS happily accepted. In the middle of the night, trucks began arriving, carrying hundreds of dogs and cats, plus a few geese, ducks, and horses. The prison housed them in a former dairy barn just a mile from its main grounds. Volunteers from Lamar-Dixon set up kennels and a makeshift clinic, and the prison sent over twelve convicts to help feed, walk, and clean cages. Injured, starving pets were nursed back to health, and most were eventually reunited with their owners. The arrangement worked out so well, HSUS decided to make it permanent. In 2007, it gave the prison a $600,000 grant to build a real shelter. It would be used in future disasters like Katrina, but also as an adoption center for the local community. I’d come to check it out.

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A few weeks ago, I gave the keynote address at the 5th International Symposium on Non-Surgical Contraceptive Methods of Pet Population Control in Portland, Oregon. For those of you who missed it and would like to see it, I have embedded it below. Unfortunately, it is just audio timed to a powerpoint presentation (no video). The first speaker you’ll hear is ASPCA science advisor Stephen Zawistowski, who introduced me. Enjoy!

(If the slideshow doesn’t display, you can view it here)

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On the road. Scientists are looking for better ways to combat the world's homeless pet problem. (Credit: Victorgrigas, Wikimedia Commons)

Next week, I’ll be the keynote speaker at the 5th International Symposium on Non-Surgical Contraceptive Methods of Pet Population Control. The conference title is a bit of a mouthful, but the basic idea is this: Can scientists develop a drug that will permanently sterilize dogs and cats? Or, put even more simply, can we make “the pill” for pets?

Now a lot of you may be asking, “Don’t we already have birth control for our companion animals?” Well, yes. Spay/neuter has been around for decades. But it’s not a perfect solution. For one, it’s expensive. That means not everyone can afford to sterilize their pet, even at a low-cost clinic. For another, it’s time consuming. That’s been a huge problem for non-profits trying to tackle America’s feral cat problem. With tens of millions of these felines on the streets, volunteers can’t catch and sterilize them quickly enough to keep up with their numbers. And if you think things in the U.S. are bad, consider China and India, which are home to tens millions of stray dogs that bite and spread rabies, yet these countries lack the resources to implement even meager spay/neuter programs. As a result of all of these limitations, millions of cats and dogs are euthanized in U.S. shelters every year, and millions more are shot and poisoned around the globe. If scientists could develop an injection or pill that would work as well as spay/neuter surgery, we might have a shot at eliminating the world’s homeless pet problem.

Enter the Alliance for Contraception in Cats & Dogs (ACC&D). Founded in 2000, the Portland, Oregon-based non-profit has been working with scientists and animal welfare advocates to create a non-surgical sterilant for pets. In late 2009, the mission got a huge boost from a U.S. billionaire named Gary Michelson, who announced $75 million in grants and prize money for the development of such a product. The announcement spurred dozens of research teams to begin brainstorming a solution. Some have proposed drugs that would kill the cells that produce sperm and eggs, treating them, essentially, like cancer. Others hope to go after the brain, shutting down pathways involved in fertility and reproduction. I covered these efforts in my award-winning 2009 article in Science, A Cure for Euthanasia?

ACC&D is behind next week’s symposium. It will be giving an update on these efforts and describing some new approaches to the problem of pet overpopulation. I’ll be talking about the topic of my book and what feral cats teach us about the changing status of pets in society. I hope you’ll check out the important work this organization is doing!