Toronto's own Bob Hunter on animal rights

[Guest guest]

Are apes people?

 

Scientists who study other creatures say it's time to rethink human rights

 

BY BOB HUNTER

 

The debate about animal rights re-entered the collective semiconsciousness last

week when a group of New Zealand scientists and activists asked their parliament

to grant the right-to-life to humanity's closest biological relatives --

chimpanzees, bonobos,

gorillas and orangutans.

 

I'm surprised no one ran the headline " Kiwis Rescue Apes. "

 

It's easy to be facetious, of course. But the moral, ethical and -- ultimately

-- legal fact of the matter is that we can no longer exclude the great apes from

the category of consciousness-possessing fellow hominids.

 

Our society is at a juncture much like that faced by the Catholic European

countries when they encountered native North Americans. Until the church stepped

in and decreed the natives had souls, they could be killed like animals because

they weren't " human. "

 

The long war against slavery turned for a while on the question of whether

non-Christians could be viewed as property -- i.e., whether they were legally

human or not.

 

The study of the great apes has reached the point where, as biologist David

Penny of Massey University said, " There's now a mountain of evidence that the

great apes are as intelligent as young human children, and very similar in their

emotional and cognitive development. "

 

He added: " They have self-awareness and theory-of-mind; hallmark traits which

were once thought to separate humanity from all other species. "

 

Just as the meteorologists and climatologists have been cautious to the point of

fatal paralysis in coming to acknowledge the stark reality of global warming, so

have the anthropologists, ethologists and primatologists been careful in the

extreme to validate their findings before going public.

 

But the body of peer-reviewed material has shifted from denial to affirmation.

Chimpanzees have, indeed, passed sign language on to their offspring, who

passed it on to theirs. As anybody who's ever tried to learn sign language

knows, this involves a certain amount of focused brain power.

 

Any entity capable of that is somebody, not something.

 

LAWS TRAIL THE SCIENCES

 

Sooner or later, our laws have to match our science, or society gets morally out

of whack. If our science says the world is round but our laws operate on the

basis that the world is flat, you either stagnate -- intellectually, as well as

in every other way -- or you adjust to the newfound truth and move forward.

 

One of the best recent books on the issue is York University sociocultural

anthropologist Barbara Noske's Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (Black

Rose Books), in which she makes the case for animal languages in general,

arguing that the only reason we don't hear them is " our less sophisticated

sensory apparatus. "

 

She cites the studies of humpback whales, who use " the longest and most

complicated of all animal songs which are known to us. It turned out that all

male

humpbacks in a particular area sing the same song, that the songs are

continually changing, and that each individual seems to keep up to date with the

current vogue. These humpback songs are reminiscent of folk songs which are

first composed, then gradually modified. "

 

Dolphin researcher John Lilly has argued for years that dolphins speak

" delphinese, " and that they should be legally elevated to human status solely on

the

basis of the complexity of their brains, which can store 10 times as much

acoustical information as ours.

 

And then there are the communications dances of honey bees....

 

I know. Where do you stop? If I were to start out in life again, I would want to

be an anthropologist or zoologist. That's where the really paradigm-butting

breakthroughs in knowledge are coming, the kind of stuff that will profoundly

change the way we think in the future.

 

The biggest change will be in our attitude toward the flora and fauna around us.

We are being displaced from the concept of ourselves at the top of a hierarchy

of creatures and starting to see humanity as part of a family of animals which

we must learn to protect rather than enslave and exterminate at will.

 

Right now, in the brutal context of our times, this sounds no doubt hilariously

naive and pious. But laws against slavery and child labor were seen as mushpot

do-gooder issues in their era. Someday, inevitably, we will be seen as

primitive. The only question is how primitive.

 

A lot of rational people who are otherwise totally hip to environmental issues

get bent out of shape when the issue of animal rights comes up. It confuses

things, they say. If you want to reach the masses and bring about actual

reforms, the last thing you want to do is get caught in the middle of a secular

religious war, with the bunny-huggers on one side and the

give-'em-guns-at-12-so-they-can-bond crowd on the other. Too bad.

 

Don't shy away from the subject, I say. See how quickly you'll get everyone's

attention if you mention it at dinner with your friends -- for instance, over

plates littered with bones.

 

 

http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_11.12.98/news_views/enviro12.html

 

 

 

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