Animal Kingdom

By Ande Jacobson

I was thinking back to a show years ago when I moved from the pit to the cast as an actor. I wrote about my experience of climbing out of the pit in a commentary piece a few months after the show closed as I prepared to jump back into the pit in another production. Being an actor rather than a musician for that production was memorable in so many ways. Overall it was a good experience to move to a new perspective and role. As I think back on that, one preshow conversation keeps coming to mind in a completely different light than it shed at the time. The theater company that put on the show had a long standing tradition of holding a company call before each performance. It happened after the house was open, the audience was milling about the lobby and the auditorium, and the performers had hopefully completed their final preparations to begin the performance. The entire company was invited to meet just outside of the stage left entrance. Announcements were made. Awards were sometimes given. Hugs were shared. Questions were answered. And it was a pleasant time for the company to come together as a whole before getting to places for curtain. Continue reading →

By Ande Jacobson

In early March, The New Yorker published a fascinating report on a legal crusade to confer “personhood” on Happy the elephant to help protect her rights. The article, entitled The Elephant in the Courtroom: A curious legal crusade to redefine personhood is raising profound questions about the interdependence of the animal and human kingdoms, discusses the fierce debate over what constitutes personhood, and why that is important for legal protection. Several cases from around the world are discussed where various non-human species were granted “non-human person” rights as part of various efforts to protect them from abuse. Animals on the endangered species lists gain a few more protections as well, but they are still not considered persons and don’t enjoy the same freedoms as humans. While the legal calisthenics over which animals deserve additional consideration based on human determination of whether they are sentient or not provide an interesting intellectual exercise, there is a basic fact of science that is lost. Rather than being separate from the Animal Kingdom, humankind is part of the Animal Kingdom as any introductory biology class (based on science) makes abundantly clear. There is indeed an interdependence between various animal species, and our arrogance aside, it should not be a legal matter but a biological imperative that supports the expansion of what we call animal rights or perhaps even personhood. Continue reading →