According to an article in
sciencemag.org, three lawsuits filed last week that attempted to achieve “legal
personhood” for chimpanzees have been struck down. They were the first step in
a nationwide campaign to grant legal rights to a variety of animals. The
Nonhuman Rights Project (NHRP) Executive Director Natalie Prosin tells ScienceInsider
that her group expected this outcome. “We were pleasantly surprised at how
respectful the judges were, specifically the two that allowed us to have oral
hearings,” she says. “We were thrilled to be able to do that. Now we have
something on record that we can take to appeals court.” She says her group is
now preparing those appeals, which she hopes will be heard in about a year.
The author of an article in spiked-online.com
disagrees, saying that even accepting a certain, limited capacity for cognition
and emotion, chimpanzees can never be persons. A chimpanzee will never
represent himself in court and demand his autonomy. A chimpanzee will never
take on a job, walk into a store and make a purchase. A chimpanzee will never
even express disdain at all the rubbish on TV. Chimpanzees will merely go on
doing what chimpanzees have always done because they lack the scope for
flexibility and engagement in anything beyond their spontaneous desires and
immediate environment. Someone, the author says, should let the NHRP know that
significant social change requires social and political engagement, not the
swift turn of a judge’s gavel.
I have worked with animals all of
my adult life and I have come to believe that it is not so much about the
rights of animals as it is about our responsibilities as humans and as stewards
of the planet. Societies decide what is right and what is wrong, and we create
laws to prohibit the wrong. Keeping a chimp in a small cage is just plain wrong
and should be prohibited by law. Does
that mean chimps should never be kept in any sort of
confinement? Probably not. Does that mean no animals
should be kept in confinement? There are many gray areas to be sure, but the
sooner we begin to focus on animal welfare and stop arguing animal rights, the
sooner we will get to an acceptable answer.
Richard Cupp, a law professor at
Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, is a proponent of focusing on
animal welfare rather than animal rights. “Animals are not persons,” he is
quoted as saying in the article in sciencemag.org, “but that does not mean that
abusing them is acceptable. Both humans and animals would be best served by
placing a strong emphasis on human responsibility for humane treatment of
animals rather than creating an artificial construct of animal
personhood."
In an article for the Toledo
Blade newspaper in 1997, syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell put it this way. “The
mush-headedness of our times is nowhere better illustrated than in the ‘animal
rights’ movement. Animals have no rights because they have no responsibilities
and are not part of our legal system. Being against cruelty to animals is one
thing, talking nonsense is another.”
