Granting human rights for non-humans?
By Jacqui Yuile-Flight

What if you caught your kid 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, or how about his sister? (not the snake’s).
Does Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the infamous Guantanamo detainee who says he personally beheaded reporter Daniel Pearl, deserve the rights he denied Mr. Pearl? And if so, which? A painless execution? Exemption from capital punishment? Decent prison conditions?
It seems to me that such apparently unrelated questions arise in the aftermath of the Spanish parliament’s Environment Committee June vote granting limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans.
The Committee’s decision 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, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer and Italian philosopher Paola Cavalieri, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans. And let’s face it, looking directly into the eyes of the Silverback Gorilla at Loro Parque always gives me and my friends the most incredible feeling of kinship (not to mention guilt for its captivity).
If the bill passes, and those in the know are certain it will, it would be illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defence. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden. And although the 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, better conditions would be mandated. So far I’m on board.
Yet what I find most intriguing about the committee's action is that it raises issues such as how much kinship humans feel for which animals, and also just which "human rights" each human deserves.
We like to think of absolutes - that there are distinct lines between humans and animals; 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. For instance, 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, like freedom from torture – rather than, say, rights to education.
Meanwhile, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many humans - like children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote, philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds, and the courts can order surgery or force-feeding.
Clearly Spain doesn't envision endowing apes with all rights - such as to drive a vehicle, to bear arms and so on – but rather their status would be akin to children's. It seems to me a great start at breaking down the species barriers, within which humans are regarded as godlike, and the rest of the animal kingdom, be it chimpanzees or clams, are treated like dirt.
Yet part of me remains uneasy. When governments start allocating ‘rights’, I get nervous. Rights are so-called because they can be neither given nor taken away. They simply are. It is privilege that is granted, or removed.
Anyway, it certainly raises an interesting moral dilemma for the newly-righteous Spanish parliament. After all, what about bullfighting?

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