Human Rights for Animals?

This story at the New York Times, on the push for human rights for non-humans, captures the essence of Europe's postmodern ideological drift:

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?

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.

Read the whole thing.

The article notes that while apes would not be according the full range of normally accepted rights and liberties, "their status would be akin to that of children."

Question for Readers: How do you feel about this? Is it appropriate for a chimp to have commensurate rights under the law to that of a child in kindergarten?

I have long considered it a moral responsibility to treat animals humanely. But as animals do not have the capacity for human reason (and hence, objective truth), I do not consider them as entitled to equal protection under the laws to that of people.

To the extent this become a bigger poltiical issue in the Western democracies, the question of animal rights will demonstrate increasingly how matters of social justice have become extremely perverted in postmodern ideology, at the expense of the improvement of human life for the great bulk of humankind around the world today.

Photo Credit: New York Times