I attended the Personhood Beyond the Human conference over G+ and it was a fantastic experience. Some really great presentations and I'm happy to see that animal behavioural sciences are making a push for this. I think there is more than enough evidence to make significant progress in pushing for nonhuman persons. And having these discussions is important the closer we get to discussing artificial persons (that was actually the last presentation of the conference - and the one I was most anticipating).

In regards to your comment b_b about "corporations and chimpanzees"; those are my thoughts exactly. I actually tweeted that out during one of the presentations:

And without going into too much detail about all of the presentations, I think this is the point that I took away from the whole conference:

Throughout history we have decided collectively what is a person and what is not. Women have not even been legal persons for 100 years in the developed world. Let that sink in. Cupp needs to do a quick revision of history to realize that he is probably on the losing end of it. Extending the sphere of personhood beyond human this century is highly probable (if not inevitable).