Spain, when human rights extend to nonhumans.

[pantsonfire321@aol.com]

When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans



David Silverman/Getty Images

ALMOST HUMAN A chimp at an Israeli wildlife park in April. Spanish lawmakers recently voted to grant apes some rights.



By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: July 13, 2008

If you caught your son burning ants with a magnifying glass, would it bother you less than if you found him torturing a mouse with a soldering iron? How about a snake? How about his sister?



World Briefing | Europe: Spain: Life and Liberty for Apes Get Support of Parliament Panel (June 26, 2008)

In the Magazine: An Animal's Place (November 10, 2002)

Great Ape Project Web Site

Readers' Comments

"Any official recognition that the world is not simply the property of humans ... is to be applauded."

Doug, Beaumont, Texas

Read Full Comment »

Does Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the Guantánamo detainee who claims he personally beheaded the reporter Daniel Pearl — deserve the rights he denied Mr. Pearl? Which ones? A painless execution? Exemption from capital punishment? Decent prison conditions? Habeas corpus?

Such apparently unrelated questions arise in the aftermath of the vote of the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals with humans.

If the bill passes — the news agency Reuters predicts it will — it would become illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden.

The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated.

What’s intriguing about the committee’s action is that it juxtaposes two sliding scales that are normally not allowed to slide against each other: how much kinship humans feel for which animals, and just which “human rights each human deserves.

We like to think of these as absolutes: that there are distinct lines between humans and animals, and that certain “human rights are unalienable. But we’re kidding ourselves.

In an interview, Mr. Singer described just such calculations behind the Great Ape Project: he left out lesser apes like gibbons because scientific evidence of human qualities is weaker, and he demanded only rights that he felt all humans were usually offered, such as freedom from torture — rather than, say, rights to education or medical care.

Depending on how it is counted, the DNA of chimpanzees is 95 percent to 98.7 percent the same as that of humans.

Nonetheless, the law treats all animals as lower orders. Human Rights Watch has no position on apes in Spain and has never had an internal debate about who is human, said Joseph Saunders, deputy program director.

“There’s no blurry middle, he said, “and human rights are so woefully protected that we’re going to keep our focus there.

Meanwhile, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many humans: children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote, philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds, courts can order surgery or force-feeding.

Spain does not envision endowing apes with all rights: to drive, to bear arms and so on. Rather, their status would be akin to that of children.

Ingrid Newkirk, a founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, considers Spain’s vote “a great start at breaking down the species barriers, under which humans are regarded as godlike and the rest of the animal kingdom, whether chimpanzees or clams, are treated like dirt.

Other commentators are aghast. Scientists, for example, would like to keep using chimpanzees to study the AIDS virus, which is believed to have come from apes.

Mr. Singer responded by noting that humans are a better study model, and yet scientists don’t deliberately infect them with AIDS.

“They’d need to justify not doing that, he said. “Why apes?

Spain’s Catholic bishops attacked the vote as undermining a divine will that placed humans above animals. One said such thinking led to abortion, euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.

But given that even some humans are denied human rights, what is the most basic right? To not be killed for food, perhaps?

Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and butterflied for smoking.

My distress — partly faked, since I was also feeling triumphant, having come this far hoping to find exactly such a scene — struck him as funny. “A gorilla is still meat, said my guide, a former gorilla hunter himself. “It has no soul.

So he agrees with Spain’s bishops. But it was an interesting observation for a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous engraving adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles, kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man, and a Brother?

1

2

Next Page »

[Nomad]

fuzzy butt;917561 wrote: wow and people were worried about having sex with dogs. By the way this is going you'll be able to marry an ape soon enough and breed with it., as an equal.




And your point is ?

[RedGlitter]

Okay I had meant to reply to this sooner and it got away from me.

It's good that they recognize that at least one species (subspecies?) should be treated with better regard. Thats good.

Where they screwed up is when they decided that only certain monkeys are going to get that treatment because some appear more human than most. That's plainass stupid. Because an ape is capable of putting a peg into a hole and a different monkey is not shows their shortsightedness.

For instance why not protect crows too? They are the smartest of the corvines, the smartest bird and among the smartest of animals. But they don't act human like apes do so they don't deserve protection?



I'll credit them a little for this nearsighted move but this is still the main country of bullfighting and actions speak louder than words.

Good topic, Pants.