Last night, I caught news that Brazilian courts are considering giving chimpanzees human rights, and following suite, Austria may as well give non-human great apes human rights. This may sound alright and dandy, maybe even give some empathy and fuel towards the conservation effort of Great Apes, but I don’t like this news one bit.
Why you ask?
Well, I don’t feel like summarizing my arguments that I announced a year ago, around the very same time, when the government of Spain issued a bill which called for human rights to other primates… but you can read my comments here. Even recently, in this forum thread, I have argued that non-human primates are not humans.
Humans and other primates do share an evolutionary history, but we are not the same, and I feel that part of the problem with these human rights bills for primates, is that many people have a misconception that primates are our direct ancestors, where we share a monophyletic lineage, which is not completely true.
Don’t get me wrong, I do want to see conditions improve for primates both in the wild and in capitivity, but I do not feel that by giving them rights that will do anything. Maybe violators of these ‘human rights’ placed on primates might be brought to justice… but my gut feeling is that this is all a misdirected effort.
How do you feel about this? Should primates have human rights? If so, which primates… and how does one choose?
4 Comments
April 6, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s a silly argument altogether. There’s a reason we have exclusive rights to the term “human:” we are a completely unique species. It’s not that we don’t have many similarities, because we do (self-awareness, large range of emotions, language potential, etc.), it’s that while we may have both descended from the trees, for whatever reason, we went on to build high-rises, write novels, create symphonies, and cook duck l’orange. And as if these arguments weren’t enough for me, what does granting other great apes “human” status really accomplish. A supreme title sure, but will it really affect their populations or habitats? Most likely not. Wouldn’t it be far more productive to work towards basic rights for all animals? Isn’t that the point anyhow? Does an animal need to share “x” number of human traits to be granted rights? Soon enough we’ll figure out that we all have basic rights, man and beast, and if we don’t grant all being these rights we will find ourselves in one very precarious situation.
April 28, 2007 at 7:17 am
[...] Chimpanzee, denied legal guardian Jump to Comments Remember when, I asked y’all about great ape human rights, and brought up how Austrian courts will judge on it earlier this [...]
August 23, 2007 at 5:54 am
i dont think it makes sense to give human rights to apes,what is it to be human,to be an animal,to be non-humans,if we are tp protect animals from abuse,exinction lets promulgate legislatin that deals with that,instaed of trying to give them human rights,what is to be human,to have rights means you have responsibities,with those rights will they be held liable for wrongs committed,will they become legal subjects in our law.
March 23, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Humans and other animals deserve fair treatment based on due consideration. Perhaps there should be a set of governing principles regarding the rights of all apes–including humans–rather than to take set set of rights that have been claimed by some humans for all humans, without all human societies accepting or agreeing that these are universal human rights, or agreeing to enforce them. Do we really want people to feel that what they think is acceptable behavior toward their fellow humans is acceptable toward the nonhuman apes?
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