The Rights of Apes

Following a report concluding that research on primates such as monkeys will continue to yield benefits into the future, Spain considers extending “human rights” to apes. Experimentation on apes is restricted in England and New Zealand.

This is very interesting stuff for classical liberal and libertarian rights theorists. On the one hand,

“rights” traditionally conceived are ill-suited to being extended even to higher animals… because animals cannot perform the duties that go along with those rights. There is only very limited reciprocity. One cannot expect a tiger or even a gorilla to understand that it is protected, so long as it does not attack anyone. Communication is just too limited, and the formation of a community … unlikely. There is little hope of trade or exchange of the sort that rewards human beings who open up their communities to outsiders. But then, we also extend rights to the incapacitated.

On the other hand I think the traditional rights theory leaves out a step. There is a lot more to the world of rights and their historical broadening to include more and more “outsiders” and “strangers” than plain, calculated reciprocity. There is also sympathy. A human being without the ability to imagine himself in the shoes of another is a poor creature indeed. Perhaps it is evolution’s way of underscoring or marking a shortcut to help us find rules under which we can all get along; that and abstract reasoning. And animals can certainly engage our sympathy.

At one time, some might have condemned this as an excess of imagination. Animals might do human-like things on the outside, but there was no evidence of an inner life like ours. Unfortunately for the simplicity of rights theory, animal researchers now rarely support this view. It never really made sense to begin with–having an inner life–some consciousness of preferences, an ability to plan, feeling pain, fear, and so on–is useful to our survival as human beings and to our social life as mammals. Indeed, to that most essential of mammal tasks, bearing and caring for young, an emotional life is absolutely necessary. It seems downright unscientific to start with an assumption that we are the only complex living creatures that have an inner life; surely it would be useful to somewhat more simple creatures as well. Furthermore it seems to beg the question to require proof of its existence when it is by nature unprovable (I don’t know absolutely for certain that my husband has an inner life… although he certainly gives a convincing impression of it). If one must start with something, let’s start by admitting that we don’t know.

Note that my commentary above is not meant to suggest any *conclusion* to the question of whether or not there ought to be experimentation on apes or other animals. But I do think it begins to answer the question of why we stop people from torturing them for fun, and are right to do so. How much further do we go?

A political theory that puts some in guardianship over others is suspect in classical liberal circles; it does not seem to suit the dignity of the ape to treat him as a child. Nor can we treat him like a trader on the floor of the stock exchange. But perhaps there is room in the world for rights-like rules for creatures other than ourselves. Or is that the wrong way to look at it? Do we need, not a legal theory, but a moral one, that revives old-fashioned virtues such as kindness? Or have the old-fashioned virtues already been tried, and failed?

I still eat meat. But only free range, so that I have some assurance that the critter had some semblance of a decent life. And I don’t eat pork at all. The news that a researcher in Pennsylvania somewhere was teaching pigs to communicate with keyboards and expected to be able in future to enable farmers to communicate with their pigs, to know if their pigs were hot or cold, hungry or in pain… well, that was just a little much. I can just see the pigs, when the truck comes to ship them off to the slaughterhouse, looking in vain for their keyboards, to ask for help. I draw the line at eating things that can talk to me.

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