[tt] When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/weekinreview/13mcneil.html?ei=5124&en=344312a1c3fc4fb8&ex=1373688000&pagewanted=print

July 13, 2008

Ideas & Trends

When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

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.

We like to think of these as absolutes: that there are distinct lines between
humans and animals, and that certain “human” rights are unalienable. But
we’re kidding ourselves.

In an interview, Mr. Singer described just such calculations behind the Great
Ape Project: he left out lesser apes like gibbons because scientific evidence
of human qualities is weaker, and he demanded only rights that he felt all
humans were usually offered, such as freedom from torture — rather than, say,
rights to education or medical care.

Depending on how it is counted, the DNA of chimpanzees is 95 percent to 98.7
percent the same as that of humans.

Nonetheless, the law treats all animals as lower orders. Human Rights Watch
has no position on apes in Spain and has never had an internal debate about
who is human, said Joseph Saunders, deputy program director.

“There’s no blurry middle,” he said, “and human rights are so woefully
protected that we’re going to keep our focus there.”

Meanwhile, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many
humans: children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote,
philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds, courts can
order surgery or force-feeding.

Spain does not envision endowing apes with all rights: to drive, to bear arms
and so on. Rather, their status would be akin to that of children.

Ingrid Newkirk, a founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,
considers Spain’s vote “a great start at breaking down the species barriers,
under which humans are regarded as godlike and the rest of the animal
kingdom, whether chimpanzees or clams, are treated like dirt.”

Other commentators are aghast. Scientists, for example, would like to keep
using chimpanzees to study the AIDS virus, which is believed to have come
from apes.

Mr. Singer responded by noting that humans are a better study model, and yet
scientists don’t deliberately infect them with AIDS.

“They’d need to justify not doing that,” he said. “Why apes?”

Spain’s Catholic bishops attacked the vote as undermining a divine will that
placed humans above animals. One said such thinking led to abortion,
euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.

But given that even some humans are denied human rights, what is the most
basic right? To not be killed for food, perhaps?

Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a
hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and
butterflied for smoking.

My distress — partly faked, since I was also feeling triumphant, having come
this far hoping to find exactly such a scene — struck him as funny. “A
gorilla is still meat,” said my guide, a former gorilla hunter himself. “It
has no soul.”

So he agrees with Spain’s bishops. But it was an interesting observation for
a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous engraving
adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles,
kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man, and a
Brother?

Whether or not Africans had souls — whether they were human in God’s eyes,
capable of salvation — underlay much of the colonial debate about slavery.
They were granted human rights on a sliding scale: as slaves, they were
property; in the United States Constitution a slave counted as only
three-fifths of a person.

As Ms. Newkirk pointed out, “All these supremacist notions take a long time
to erode.”

She compared the rights of animals to those of women: it only seems like a
long time, she said, since they got the vote or were admitted to medical
schools. Or, she might have added, to the seminary. Though no Catholic bishop
would suggest that women lack souls, it will be quite a while before a female
bishop denounces Spain’s Parliament.

But we’re drifting from that most basic right — to not be killed for food.

Back to the clearing. As someone who eats foie gras and veal (made from
tortured animals) and has eaten whale (in Iceland), I don’t know why I
suddenly turned squeamish when offered a nibble of primate. On reflection, I
probably faked that too. When I was young, my family used to drive over
Donner Pass each year to go camping, and my mother would regale us with the
history of the Donner Party. Even as a child, I had no doubt that, in
extremis, I would have tucked in.

On our drive back to Cameroon’s coast, my guide insisted that some of the
local Fang people, well known for cannibalism in the 19th century, still dug
up bodies to eat. I believed him partly because in South Africa, where I then
lived, murder victims were often found missing the body parts needed in
traditional medicine.

Cannibalism is repugnant to the laws of all countries. But that repugnance is
not written in the extra tidbits of DNA that separate us from chimps. Quite
the opposite: “pot polish” on human bones found in various archaeological
sites suggests that some of our ancestors exited this world as stew. That too
puts us in the “community of equals” with apes; female chimpanzees are known
to eat rivals’ babies.

But when human law does intervene in this primate-eat-primate world, it is
also on a sliding scale. Even animal cruelty laws have a bias toward big
mammals like us. For example, in a slaughterhouse, chickens are sent alive
and squawking into the throat-slitting machine and the scalding bath.

But under the federal Humane Slaughter Act, a cow must be knocked senseless
as painlessly as possible before the first cut can be made.

Which raises an interesting moral dilemma for the righteous Spanish
Parliament: What about bullfighting?

As in all great struggles separating man from beast: a lot of it’s in the
capework. Olé!