I did not mean to imply you should not anthropomorphize your cat for amusement. But making moral judgements based on humanizing a cat is plainly wrong to me.

Interesting, would you mind giving an example of what kind of moral judgement based on humanizing a cat you would find objectionable?

It's a silly example, but if my cat were able to speak and write decent code, I think that I really would be upset that a github maintainer rejected the PR because they only allow humans.

On a less silly note, I just did a bit of a web search about the legal personhood of animals across the world and found this interesting situation in India, whereby in 2013 [0]:

> the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, recognising the human-like traits of dolphins, declared dolphins as “non-human persons”

Scholars in India in particular [1], and across the world have been seeking to have better definition and rights for other non-human animal persons. As another example, there's a US organization named NhRP (Nonhuman Rights Project) that just got a judge in Pennsylvania to issue a Habeas Corpus for elephants [2].

To be clear, I would absolutely agree that there are significant legal and ethical issues here with extending these sorts of right to non-humans, but I think that claiming that it's "plainly wrong" isn't convincing enough, and there isn't a clear consensus on it.

[0] https://www.thehindu.com/features/kids/dolphins-get-their-du...

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3777301

[2] https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/judge-issues-pennsylvani...