Great Ape personhood
Great Ape personhood is a movement to create legal recognition of common chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (the great apes) as bona fide persons.
Advocacy
Well-known advocates are primatologist Jane Goodall, appointed a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations to fight the bushmeat trade and end ape extinction;[1] Richard Dawkins, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University; [2]Peter Singer, professor of philosophy at Princeton University; [3]; and attorney and former Harvard professor Steven Wise.[4]
Goodall's longitudinal studies revealed the social and family life of chimps to be very similar to that of human beings in some respects. She herself calls them individuals, and says they relate to her as an individual member of the clan. Laboratory studies of ape language ability began to reveal other human traits, as did genetics, and eventually three of the great apes were reclassified as hominids.
This, plus rising ape extinction and the animal-rights movement has put pressure on nations to recognize apes as having limited rights and being legal "persons". In response, the United Kingdom introduced a ban on research using Great Apes, although testing on other non-human primates continues. [5]
Opposition
Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College, London, opposes the movement, arguing that, although great apes share over 98% of DNA with humans, all species of life share common DNA to a certain extent. He also argues that, "Rights and responsibilities go together and I've yet to see a chimp imprisoned for stealing a banana because they don't have a moral sense of what's right and wrong. To give them rights is to give them something without asking for anything in return." [1]
Kenan Malik writes in Man, Beast and Zombie that demonstrations of apes appearing to use language have lacked rigour, and that there is no evidence that apes possess a natural capacity for language, abstract concepts, or symbolic thought; they do not, in Malik's view, possess anything like humans' awareness of self.[6]
See also
- Ape
- Ape extinction
- Chantek
- Declaration on Great Apes
- Great Ape language
- Great Ape Project
- Hominoid
- List of apes - notable individual apes
- Person
- Speciesism
- The Mind of an Ape
- Theory of mind
- Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Steven Best, Richard D. Ryder
- Great Ape research ban
- Emotion in animals
Notes
- ^ Goodall, Jane in Cavalieri, Paola & Singer, Peter. (eds.) The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity. St Martin's Griffin, 1994.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard. "Gaps in the Mind" in Cavalieri, Paola & Singer, Peter. (eds.) The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity. St Martin's Griffin, 1994.
- ^ Cavalieri, Paola & Singer, Peter. (eds.) The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity. St Martin's Griffin, 1994.
- ^ Motavalli, Jim. "Rights from Wrongs. A Movement to Grant Legal Protection to Animals is Gathering Force", E Magazine, March/April 2003.
- ^ http://education.guardian.co.uk/businessofresearch/story/0,,1663535,00.html
- ^ Malik, Kenan. Man, Beast and Zombie. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000: 214-17.
External links
| The great apes | ||
|---|---|---|
| Extant genera | Pongo · Gorilla · Pan · Homo |  |
| Extant species | Bornean Orangutan · Sumatran Orangutan · Western Gorilla · Eastern Gorilla · Common Chimpanzee · Bonobo · Human | |
| Great ape study | Aquatic ape hypothesis · Ape language · Ape Trust · Dian Fossey · Birutė Galdikas · Jane Goodall · Chimpanzee genome project · Human genome project | |
| Legal status | Personhood · Research ban · Declaration · Kinshasa Declaration · Great Ape Project · Survival Project | |
| See also... | Bushmeat · Ape extinction · List of notable apes · Human evolution | |
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