The Ethics of Life
The Rights of Apes – and Humans
Peter Singer
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MELBOURNE – On June 25, in a historic vote, the Spanish parliament’s Commission for the Environment, Agriculture, and Fisheries declared its support for The Great Ape Project, a proposal to grant rights to life, liberty, and protection from torture to our closest nonhuman relatives: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. Other countries, such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom, have taken steps to protect great apes from harmful experimentation, but no national parliament has declared that any animal could be a person with rights.
The resolution, which the full parliament is expected to adopt, directs the Spanish government to promote a similar European Union-wide declaration. It also calls on the government to adopt, within a year, legislation to prohibit potentially harmful experiments on great apes that are not in their interests.
Keeping great apes in captivity will be allowed for purposes of conservation only, and then under optimal conditions for the apes. Moreover, it recommends that Spain take steps in international forums and organizations to ensure that great apes are protected from maltreatment, slavery, torture, being killed, and being made extinct.
Paola Cavalieri and I founded The Great Ape Project in 1993 to break down the barriers between human and nonhuman animals. Researchers like Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, and Birute Galdikas have shown that great apes are thinking, self-aware beings, with rich emotional lives, and thereby prepared the ground for extending basic rights to them.
If we regard human rights as something possessed by all human beings, no matter how limited their intellectual or emotional capacities may be, how can we deny similar rights to great apes, who clearly surpass some human beings in their rationality, self-awareness, and emotional bonds with others? To do so would be to display a prejudice against other beings merely because they are not members of our species – a prejudice we call speciesism, to highlight its resemblance to racism.
The Great Ape Project seeks to change the way we think about great apes, and ultimately, about animals in general. The Spanish resolution marks the first official acceptance of that view.
The use of the term “slavery” in relation to something that it is wrong to do to animals is especially significant, for until now it has been assumed that animals are rightly our slaves, to use as we wish, whether to pull our carts, be models of human diseases for research, or produce eggs, milk, or flesh for us to eat. Recognition by a government that it can be wrong to enslave animals is a significant breach in the wall of exclusive moral significance we have built around our own species.
While Spanish parliamentarians were sympathetically considering the rights of animals, however, in Austria ten leaders of lawful animal-welfare organizations were beginning their fifth week in prison. At dawn on May 21, police burst into 23 separate locations, roused people from their beds, put guns to their heads, and forced one leader of an animal-welfare organization to stand in a public place in his underwear for two hours. They seized computers and files, disabling the animal-rights movement as it was on the eve of launching a new initiative to enshrine the protection of animals in the Austrian constitution.
The ten arrested leaders are being held without charges or specific allegations made against them, under a law aimed at members of criminal organizations such as the mafia. The police have presented no evidence that any of those arrested were involved in violence. Yet a court has now remanded all ten to be held in prison until September.
After 17 days in prison, three people were accused of threatening a press officer for a fashion store by hindering her from driving away. Another, Martin Balluch, has been given a 1,500-page police file to justify his arrest. In the file, his name is mentioned only three times, all in connection with interviews he gave to the media or articles he wrote.
Ironically, Balluch, a brilliant man with doctorates in both physics and philosophy, is one of the foremost spokespersons in the worldwide animal-rights movement for pursuing the nonviolent, democratic road to reform. In an essay he wrote for In Defense of Animals , a book I edited that appeared in 2006, he wrote, “No realistic level of guerilla attacks of the kind carried out by the Animal Liberation Front could have hurt the battery farming industry as much as the new Austrian law does.”
In recent years, Austrian animal-welfare organizations have been remarkably successful in persuading voters and legislators to support laws phasing out cages for egg-laying hens, cages for raising rabbits for meat, and raising animals for fur. As Balluch writes: “A law banning a whole industry does far more economic damage to the animal abuse industry than anything else the animal movement could do.”
The police persecution of the animal movement appears to be an attempt by the conservative party, which controls the Ministry of the Interior, and its animal industry supporters to strike back at a legitimate, peaceful challenge to the way we treat animals. That this can happen in a European democracy is shocking.
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Animal Liberation, co-editor, with Paola Cavalieri, of The Great Ape Project, and editor of In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.
www.project-syndicate.org
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jon 04:33 30 Dec 09
I agree that the police behaviour described in this article is shocking. However, I believe that the also-mentioned "Great Ape Project" demonstrates much of the same anthropomorphism that has characterised human beliefs, and behaviour, towards animals for all of the historical record. (An influential example being the Old Testament belief that we are "made in God's image". This is a ludicrous idea even if you do believe in God - human beings are reliant on earth's particular planetary properties: composition of the atmosphere, prevalence of water, prevalence of plants, prevalence of certain minerals found in the soil, etc; so our physiological makeup: body-size, presence of limbs, digestive-system, metabolism, thinking and perceiving skills, etc, all reflect this earth-origin. If God was really like us, even in appearance, he simply couldn't survive in a universe preceeding earth!) Why limit political activity to noticeably humanlike organisms?
In any case, cats (in particular) and dogs are also very humanlike (more similar to humans, in behaviour, than they are to their wild relatives). This obviously occurs - not only because they are nurtured by humans, but also because they have been genetically selected (especially dogs): for qualities like intelligence, tameness, obediance, etc.
I lived with a cat who not only died a martyr's death (largely through my own stupidity, but also due to the behaviour of a certain vet), she also demonstrated (while alive) three "miracles" that I find inexplicable:
1) She showed evidence of paranormal consciousness: she responded to my visualising myself thrusting a large knife at her from above (to test for psychic awareness) by simultaneously leaping out of my lap. (Something she never did before, or since.)
2) Once, when I was practising violin for the first time, she leapt onto the table in front of me, walked over, and used her front right paw (with claws extended) to pull my face toward her, while opening her mouth wide (and aimed at my mouth) as if to kiss me.
3) After she responded (while resting, to a stroke along her back I made while drunk) by pretend-attacking me by biting ultra-rapidly (machine-like) just in front of my skin, all the while emitting a furious sounding noise, I replied quite angrily by telling her to "Get out!" (trying to growl like a lion). She immediately went and waited at the door for me to open it. (I had never trained her to do this, nor had I ever said the words to anyone else in her presence - I had very few visitors anyway. What I has done was talk to her at times, at first as if she was a toddler - but I had never used the verb "to get out".)
These were not the only signs she gave of above average intelligence (for a cat, or for a human), there were many others - like talking to me, quite often, in easily understood ways (such as marking differing emotion-states: from pleasure to extreme unhappiness; anger at an action of mine, like lifting her off my lap; or physical pain - i.e. when I accidently stepped on her tail; or using meows on location as a guide to her meaning - the kitchen if she was hungry; a shelf if she wanted lifting down; by the radiator if she wanted it turned on; or coming into the toilet because she felt I took too long), and understanding my communications to her (such as calling her by name to get her to come; or hissing like a cat at her, to get her not to follow me when I went onto the street). She was also quite fussy with food, especially when young (when she just wouldn't eat until I began to prepare roasted bite-size chunks of kangaroo for her). I believe such discernment is a sign of intelligence (which wouldn't be found, for example, in a dog). In addition, it is my belief that "cats can't be trained" because (unlike dogs) they refuse to train us to train them. (For example, they learn to use a litter box when tiny kittens - taught, via demonstration, by their mothers, not humans.) They will, however, repeat behaviours they enjoy our response to, often at their own instigation. (My cat, for example, began walking up near my shoulders on the bed - so I could hug her, for a regular twenty seconds, after which she would squeeze out of my grasp and return to her sleeping spot.)
Pigs have also been found to be highly intelligent, even passing Lacan's "mirror-stage" of development (a test which I feel is neither fair, nor relevant, when used on smell-centric animals like cats or dogs - as opposed to vision-centric animals like ourselves or, possibly, birds, though even birds usually don't stare continuously, like we do). But I agree that intelligence alone should not come into it, since we (quite correctly) give rights to intellectually disabled human beings. Nevertheless, it is useful to point out such animal intelligence, particularly when challenging behaviourism or, more importantly, anthropomorphism and it's impact on ethics.
It is obvious that ancient Indians (Buddhists, brahmins, and Jains) were way ahead of Westerners regarding the extension of ethical behaviour towards animals. (Although the early Christians, and post C.E. Jews, did at least do away with animal sacrifice.) Not only is it wretched (and unhealthy) for animals like ourselves to eat meat. Furs make the wearer look ridiculous, and leather is easily substituted. More importantly, the extension of human life partly through medical experiments on other creatures (currently involving nearly ten million animals per year) makes the adjective "humane" simply nonsensical. Humans are, it is abundantly clear, the cruellest behaving animals in all recorded knowledge.