Posted on 03/29/2007 9:08:36 PM PDT by WesternCulture
Should apes have human rights?
By Tom Geoghegan BBC News Magazine
Apes and humans have common ancestors but should they have the same rights? An international movement to give them "personhood" is gathering pace. What would Aristotle make of it? More than 2,000 years after the Greek philosopher declared Mother Nature had made all animals for the sake of man, there are moves to put the relationship on a more equal footing.
Judges in Austria are considering whether a British woman, Paula Stibbe, should become legal guardian of a chimpanzee called Hiasl which was abducted from its family tribe in West Africa 25 years ago.
The animal sanctuary where he has lived is about to close and to stop him being sold to a zoo, Ms Stibbe hopes that she can persuade the court he deserves the same protection as a child.
Spanish MPs are also being urged to back a similar principle, one already endorsed by the Balearic parliament and held dear by the international organisation The Great Ape Project - that apes be granted the right to life, freedom and protection from torture.
So should apes such as those at London Zoo, which opens its Gorilla Kingdom on Thursday complete with gym and climbing wall, get the same rights as their zookeepers?
They need greater protection in the eyes of the law, says Ian Redmond of the UN's Great Apes Survival Project, who believes welfare groups could use guardianship as a way to rescue ill-treated apes.
Some rights are conferred on apes but only because they are endangered. And the international trade ban is flouted in Africa and South-East Asia, where mothers are shot and their infants shipped off as pets, circus performers or lab animals. Vivisection on apes is banned in much of Europe but still goes on in the US and Japan.
"Apes are special because they are so closely related to us," says Mr Redmond. "Chimpanzees and bonobos are our joint closest living relatives, differing by only one per cent of DNA - so close we could accept a blood transfusion or a kidney. Gorillas are next, then orang-utans."
But there is a stronger cognitive argument, he says, because the apes' intelligence and ability to reason demands our respect.
"Show a gibbon a mirror and the reaction suggests he or she thinks the reflection is another gibbon. But all the great apes have passed the 'mirror self-recognition' test and soon begin checking their teeth or examining parts of their body they couldn't see without the mirror. This self-awareness surely suggests that they know they exist."
Family ties
Apes also share a range of human emotions, says zoologist Charlotte Uhlenbroek, who thinks they should be afforded legal protection enshrined in law.
They have a similar lifespan to humans and form strong family bonds which they maintain for life, she says. And apes have displayed a tenderness which could be described as love, anxiety when separated, and fear, jealousy and trauma.
"If I was an alien from Mars and looked at human society and a society of apes then in terms of the emotional life I would see no distinct difference, although we live very different lives because of language and technology."
Giving them rights does not mean throwing open all the cage doors because some zoos are important to preserve the species, but it is vital to establish a principle that apes should not be treated like objects, she says.
Daniel Sokol, a medical ethicist, says apes possess cognitive and emotional faculties that make them worthy of moral consideration.
"Justice and consistent thinking require that we treat non-human animals who share morally-relevant properties in a respectful way, and that surely means giving them the opportunity to flourish and not be tortured or subject to cruel or degrading treatment."
But Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University of London, says human rights are a construct which can't be imposed on animals.
"Where do you stop? It seems to be that being human is unique and nothing to do with biology. Say that apes share 98% of human DNA and therefore should have 98% of human rights. Well mice share 90% of human DNA. Should they get 90% of human rights? And plants have more DNA than humans."
Chimps can't speak but parrots can. Defining creatures and allowing them rights based on criteria invented by one group is itself an enormous breach of human rights, he says, and one need look no further than Austria in 1939 to see why.
"Rights and responsibilities go together and I've yet to see a chimp imprisoned for stealing a banana because they don't have a moral sense of what's right and wrong. To give them rights is to give them something without asking for anything in return."
There is a moral case to make about animal welfare, he says, but it has nothing to do with science.
Are they humans?
Maybe they can get jobs as reporters for the BBC.
I thought silverback said he was leaving FR for awhile. I guess we know why now ;-)
They shouldn't be allowed to vote
Recently, they created a sheep that is 15% human, the Dems will want it to vote.
Democrats already do.
sorry, bad joke
They should be protected.
Read them their rights and ask if they understand.
The article is pretty fair about making the point that the animals aren't moral themselves- I was going to bring up the fact that chimpanzees have been known to systematically kill off members of rival groups and in one case I recall seeing in a documentary a group of chimps killed their abusive leader- they organized themselves into groups first, though,- any animal can fight and kill its rivals, but this indicated premeditation.
Do they pay taxes?
There are few places in the world were humans have human rights.
If Rosie would promiss to behave, I think she might be given some limited rights.
I'm not gonna touch this one.
Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore, and Rosie O'Fat-F$%k all have human rights, so what's the difference?
Premeditated murder...just like us humans all too often.
We give some animals greater protections than others all the time. We kill chickens and cows, even baby cows to eat, but you can't slaughter dogs and eat them in America. Horses are right at the cusp, and there's a movement afoot to halt the slaughter and eating of horsemeat too.
With the apes, we're dealing with animals that are not very common, not indigenous to our part of the world, and not part of our food chain. They sure do exhibit a range of intelligence and emotions. Perhaps we should take pity on them and give them much greater protections than any other animals.
But we should see clearly that there is a catch to this. If apes have rights, animal testing using apes ENDS. No more chimpanzee tests of drugs. We will have to find other proxies, either animals or human. Of course, China is perfectly willing to test drugs on prisoners, so even if we protect the apes completely, in this ever-more-Chinese world of ours we may get much better and truer drug safety tests regarding humans...by having the bad guys test them on humans.
Well, I played ball with a few apes.
Why not? Liberals do.
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