Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA) offers the following Bill as an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States when human beings achieve sufficient understanding and moral progress to embrace and ratify it. To show support for the Draft Bill, print a copy, print your name at the bottom, sign, date, and mail to RPA, P.O. Box 891, Glenside, PA 19038, USA. RPA welcomes serious comments as the Bill evolves and enters into public consciousness.
Whereas nonhuman animals are biological persons who should be deemed legal persons, naturally entitled to freedom from human beings and their families, societies, industries, institutions, economies, technologies, and overpopulation;
Whereas rights are necessary for meaningful protection against tyranny and injustice and their depredations;
Whereas the quadrillions of persons lacking rights – the nonhuman animals – are subject to limitless atrocity and injustice due to their lack of rights;
Whereas nearly all human suffering, loss, deprivation, and early death arise from injustice toward nonhuman animals;
Whereas the United States cannot fulfill its Constitution’s stated purposes for human beings – justice, liberty, equality, defense, tranquility, and the general welfare – absent rights of all animals;
Whereas denying nonhuman persons basic rights undermines the Constitutional principles of justice, liberty, equality, tranquility, defense, welfare, and liberty for human and nonhuman persons alike; and
Whereas all persons, human and nonhuman alike, require justice, equality, tranquility, defense, welfare, and liberty – the Constitution’s stated values – to experience a fulfilling life,
Therefore be it established that …
All nonhuman animals shall henceforth be considered persons under the Constitution and laws of the United States of America and shall possess the following unalienable equal individual autonomy, ecology, and dignity rights. A person’s being nonhuman shall not constitute a Constitutional or legal basis for unequal treatment.
No human being, or government or other human-created entity, shall abridge the autonomy right of any nonhuman animal not to be captured, sexually or reproductively molested (“bred”), owned, used, exploited, controlled, or manipulated, genetically or otherwise.
No human being, or government or other human-created entity, shall abridge the right of any nonhuman animal not to be injured, killed, or captured without due process of law as applied to human beings. Self-defense may only constitute an exception to this provision in circumstances like those involving humans.
No human being, or government or other human-created entity, shall abridge the right of any nonhuman animal to move about freely, seek food, water, or shelter, communicate, play, congregate, associate, migrate, court, reproduce, raise offspring, or otherwise behave as natural to the animal’s species unmodified by humans through “breeding,” genetic manipulation, or other means.
Any human being shall have standing to sue for enforcement of these rights on behalf of any nonhuman animal(s) and to redress grievances on behalf of any nonhuman animal(s) through the same institutions and procedures as established for human beings.