From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sun Apr 28 2002 - 10:10:55 MDT
There was a front page article in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday
about a new organization, The Chimpanzee Collaboratory, which promotes
chimp (is that word now un-pc?) rights. The article is reprinted at the
Collaboratory web site, http://www.chimpcollaboratory.org/news/index.asp:
> The Chimpanzee Collaboratory, a new, national coalition of research and
> advocacy groups, has drafted model legislation to allow nonprofit groups
> to petition courts to act as guardians for any chimpanzee "subjected
> to the willful use of force or violence upon its body." Members of the
> coalition have received a total of $1 million over the past two years
> from the foundation of Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks Inc.,
> a Seattle software company.
>
> The advocates of granting legal standing to chimps have gained support
> from constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School
> professor. Mr. Tribe argues that the leap isn't as great as it might
> appear: Courts recognize corporations as juristic, or legal, "persons";
> that is, they enjoy and are subject to legal rights and duties.
> ...
> Steven Wise, a lecturer at Harvard and author of "Rattling the Cage,"
> a 2000 manifesto for chimpanzee rights, says the animals are more like
> our children than our property. It isn't just the 98.7% of DNA the two
> species have in common. Like Homo sapiens, chimps have complex social
> interactions, use tools and teach their offspring distinctive cultural
> traits. With sign language, some chimps seem to be able to communicate
> at about the level of a three- or four-year-old child.
>
> "If a human four-year-old has what it takes for legal personhood, then a
> chimpanzee should be able to be a legal person in terms of legal rights,"
> Mr. Wise says.
IMO animal rights are often taken to extremes, but in the case of chimps I
think they make some good points. If we're going to support animal rights,
it makes sense to be selective and to look at intelligence and brain size.
Chimpanzees and some of the other apes are close enough to humans that
they should be the first candidates for legal rights.
Unfortunately I think we also have to look at the costs involved as well.
Someday, when we are wealthier as a culture, it may be possible to
protect the rights of all animals. Now, though, it is not feasible to
grant rights to food animals or other species which would impose large
economic costs. Even in the case of chimps, since they cannot give
informed consent to medical experiments, it means that humans would have
to be used at an earlier stage, imposing costs on them because of less
thorough testing.
Hal
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