Human Rights for Apes

[xenologer]

Spanish parliament to extend rights to apes

Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.

Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.

(snip)

"We have no knowledge of great apes being used in experiments in Spain, but there is currently no law preventing that from happening," Pozas said.

Keeping apes for circuses, television commercials or filming will also be forbidden and breaking the new laws will become an offence under Spain's penal code.

Keeping an estimated 315 apes in Spanish zoos will not be illegal, but supporters of the bill say conditions will need to improve drastically in 70 percent of establishments to comply with the new law.

This is so cool. There's another sort of creature on Earth that can think, that can reason, that can read. They do these things at least as well as human children, if not better. So it's good to see them getting some legal rights somewhere.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jeremiad/]

This bothers me, for a couple of reasons.

One, I'd be way more impressed if rights of personhood were extended to all persons before we begin extending them to other species.

Two, isn't there some disagreement among various social scientists about chimps ability to think, reason, and read? Anthropologists show that, while numerous species use tools, only humans use tools to make other tools. Linguists show that humans are the only species to use language. And how do you prevent anthromorphizing apes, that is, seeing humanlike behaviors in them because that's what you want to see?

Since this overlaps with your area, maybe you could help me?

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

I'm not really a primatologist, but from what I've learned about apes... one reason it's hard not to anthromorphize them is that they're very much like humans already.

The fact that they can be taught to spell, the fact that they pass on knowledge from generation to generation (and more complicated things than, say, a cat teaching her kittens to use the box), along with the fact that their "language" might be more specific than we assume (chimps played the calls other chimps made were able to point to the food the chimps in the recording had been responding to), means that their intelligence likely gives them an ability to learn somewhere in line with a human child at the least. The same could be said of many birds (which suggests to me that we shouldn't be experimenting on them either). The average octopus is also really freaking smart.

I agree that we should concentrate primarily on human rights as applied to humans, as a sort of "clean up your own backyard first" deal. On the other hand, if we can acknowledge that animals shouldn't be tortured or experimented on, it erodes whatever case might be made for doing it to people.

It sounds weird, but it's what happened with children. If I recall it was the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that heard the first child cruelty case in England. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSPCC) It was only after that that people started wondering whether young humans might have rights sorta like adults do. It seemed to have started with, "well, you can't even do this to an animal, so..." and went from there.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jeremiad/]

I don't know about the UK, but I do know the first child abuse case heard in America was that of Mary Ellen Wilson and it was indeed heard by the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

I get what you're saying. It makes sense. I'm not sure I agree with it, or that it's a very good use of resources, but that's my completely subjective, biased opinion.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean, it's pretty fucking pathetic that it takes advances in animal rights to get people thinking "maybe we shouldn't do this to each other either," but evidently that's how it works. *sigh*

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jeremiad/]

Thinking about historical precedent, your logic makes perfect sense.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that all of the things you now can't legally do to an ape in Spain, you also can't legally do to a person in Spain. So it's not like apes are getting actual priority over any people in the rights game.

And yeah, there are things that people do that apes don't do. There are also things that non-cognitively-disabled humans do that cognitively disabled humans don't do, things adults do that babies don't do. This isn't to say that apes are equivalent to people of any sort, but the point is that people will often justify oppressing other people or other life forms based on distinctions that don't actually make a difference, morally. I'm pretty sure that Western colonists frequently called attention to all the things they did that the people they colonized didn't/"couldn't" do, like use writing or study literature or dominate their environment or whatever.

I think when I'm deciding whether or not it's okay to make someone suffer, it really doesn't occur to me to ask whether they use tools to make other tools. Some people may actually feel like it's okay to cause suffering in people who can't use language, but I don't think that's justifiable. It's hard to actually pinpoint what does matter, though. I think though that if capacity for complex thought (as opposed to simple capacity for some thought) is important, it should be flexible in recognition of the fact that there are always going to be significant differences in behavior across species boundaries.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jeremiad/]

Perhaps. I don't know the intimate details of Spain's legal system. My point was moreso that in a world where women are still blamed for being victims of rape or where racial minorities are treated like subhumans, is equality for apes really what people need to be concerned about?

I'm also very, very not okay with you equating "oppressing" apes with colonization and/or slavery.

My point is that I'm much more concerned with extending equal rights to all humans regardless of race or gender or ethnicity or ability or sexuality before deciding it's time to extend rights to apes. I'm saying we need to kill and torture apes mercilessly, but that I believe a society's priorities are skewed when people are more concerned about animals than about other people.

But then I feel the same away about Georgia law which makes cruelty against animals a felony, but beating your wife a misdemeanor, so...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jeremiad/]

Bad, bad typo.

One of those sentences should read, "I'm not saying we need to kill or torture apes..."

[sammka.livejournal.com]

There's a lot wrong with the world, but only so many of those things are things that the Spanish legislature can really address. The fact that other things are wrong with the world doesn't mean that Spanish legislature needs to wait until everything else is fixed before they can go about doing stuff for apes. It's not like Spanish parliament was thinking "gee we can only pass one law, either we can pass this law that eliminates racism and sexism in our country or we can pass this law about apes, guess we'll go with the apes because they're cuter."

Unlike the Georgia law, as far as I can tell there's no way in which the legal rights of humans, as codified by Spanish law, compares unfavorably with the legal rights of apes. The only things that the law prohibits, as far as I can tell, is keeping apes in captivity for commercial use or medical experimentation, and killing them. I am pretty sure it's illegal in Spain to do that to people of any kind.

And the only thing I was "equating" was the practice of basing moral obligations toward people or animals on morally meaningless distinctions. Because it has been used to justify colonialism, slavery, ownership of women, child abuse, and warehousing/isolation/abuse/extermination of people with disabilities, yeah, I will call people on it, even in cases like apes where the moral stakes may not be as high. It's an argumentative tool that as far as I can tell has only been used for bad.

And for full disclosure, I tend to think animals do have rights, and I'm also a disability rights geek, and many people with disabilities are nonverbal and can't make tools out of tools. I don't think it makes them less deserving of moral consideration. What makes people deserving of moral consideration is something beyond that.

[kaisharga.livejournal.com]

Man, that is so awesome. It's not April 1, right? This is too out-there in the right way.