Apes and Human Rights

From a couple of news sources:

The governing socialists in Spain have put forward legislation to grant great apes ‘human rights’. The same government which stripped from unborn human children the right to life and permits destructive research on human embryos, has put forward legislation to grant great apes the rights the rights to life, freedom and to not being tortured, according to a report by Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

The idea of “human” rights for great apes is possibly a stab at what secularists regard as “retrograde” Christian ideas about the hierarchical nature of creation with man, as the image of God, at the top.



Spain is about to take the world into uncharted legal territory. Later this month, a resolution is going before parliament which, if passed as expected, will give a set of rights to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans. These great apes will then be regarded in Spanish law as "legal persons."

It will be of historic significance, the first time that any civilization has recognized the special status of another species and the need to protect it not only from extinction but also from individual abuse. Spain will be obliged to introduce new laws protecting the great apes, putting pressure on other European countries to follow suit, and will undertake to organize a forum of rich nations to fund the protection of the great apes in their natural habitat.

The resolution is based on the work of the Great Ape Project, which was founded in 1993 by philosophers Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri. It urges the goverment in Spain to take the necessary measures in international forums and organizations to protect great apes from maltreatment, slavery, torture, death and extinction.

The central idea of the project is that the great apes share more than just DNA with humans. There is an enormous amount of data collected by scientists, including Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey and Birute Galdikas, that the great apes are intelligent beings with strong emotions that often resemble our own.

So if you are planning to go to Spain later in the year when the bill is passed, don't be suprised to see a gorilla walking down the street in a suit, or a ape serving you coffee in Starbucks.