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Underground > Laboratory >

Ape Rights

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18:18 / 04.04.07

Red Concrete- check this part In New Zealand, apes - gorillas, orang utans, chimpanzees and bonobos - were granted special rights as 'non-human hominids' in 1999 to grant protection from maltreatment, slavery, torture, death and extinction.

I imagine they're aiming for something like that, and using the case to drum up publicity and support as pressure groups are wont to do. You're right about the lack of barbescience though, sheesh.

20:08 / 30.04.07

Alas, not yet to be.

The guardianship case was thrown out of an Austrian court.

In a trustee court hearing on 24 April, the judge denied the request. She said that if she appointed a legal guardian for a chimp, then this might create the public perception that humans with court-appointed legal guardians are at the same level as animals.

Balluch says his group will appeal the decision to a higher district court.

11:18 / 11.05.07

From yesterday's Guardian:

Let me be a bonobo.

Whilst I am for enhanced rights for some species (and our nearest primate relatives are amongst those I think need to be upgraded). I have a problem with articles like this that seem to try and romanticise the life of other primates as some sort of utopian alternative. I realise Barbara Ehrenreich is not necessarily being serious here but still.

Claiming that the chimp itself is applying for human status is inaccurate anyway. Even the few primates which have shown some aptitude for sign language have only been able to master it at a very basic level.

Applying human rights to a chimp is not what is needed. We need to apply chimp rights to chimps. Their society and lifestyle differs from ours in many ways and that needs to be taken into account.

Primate rights certainly need to include the right not to be experimented on or, at least, not to be experimented on in ways which can harm them (plus some form of compensation appropriate to the species should be offered, ie food).

How would primate rights be determined with regards to land ownership? Does a group of chimpanzees own the area in which they roam? If a company wanted to exploit resources in a region controlled/occupied/owned by chimps how would they deal with that?

Thoughts?

07:56 / 31.05.08

Like a hairy squid thread, up from the depths it rises!

Read this on the Guardian site this morning and thought people would be interested.

Inside a research facility that uses primates as test subjects.

From the bottom of that article:

Research using non-human primates is the most controversial area of animal research, but it accounts for a tiny minority of experiments. No great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas) have been used in experiments in the UK since 1986 and it has been government policy not to use them since 1997. No prosimians (for example, bush babies and lemurs) have been used for several years. Baboons have not been used since 1998. Scientists argue that animal research is highly regulated to ensure it is carried out as humanely as possible. Home office inspectors make unannounced visits to licensed laboratories to check standards of animal welfare. A five-year licence can take six months of detailed work to put together and submit to the Home Office. The research is expensive. Housing a marmoset for a year costs around £4,000; a larger macaque monkey around £18,000.

Closed for Business Time

15:05 / 26.06.08

Spain to comply with Great Apes Project guidelines!

15:56 / 26.06.08

That Lurid, that is. He's a man of influence.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

11:40 / 06.07.08

the chief difference between humans and animals (and other forms of life) is cultural.

we have our different ways of communicating, eating, sleeping and living. based on how our physical bodies interact with our respective ecosystems.

that said, the right should protect the individual from suffering etc... however, in terms of one species eating another, as long as the overall populations thrive, then the consumption of an individual doesn't seem as tragic (unless it was someone you know).

08:55 / 07.07.08

the chief difference between humans and animals (and other forms of life) is cultural.

Explore that a little more. The chief difference between different nationalities is cultural. But I'm not sure that if you put an ape into a human's body (if such a thing were possible), you would get a human. Genetics is probably the biggest underlying difference between different lifeforms.

I can see some validity in the argument that living beings have life and deserve to be treated respectfully, but there are differences, and then there are orders of difference.

I'm not arguing for a heirarchy of preferential treatment, necessarily, but it is possible to overgeneralise "rights".

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

14:57 / 08.07.08

wrt animals differing from humans due to culture.

might help to define a few things here.

I take culture to mean the way you live according to the needs of your body, and the provisions of your ecosystem. You don't need a nation state to define that. You can be an ant in the amazon, or an ape in the mountains of tanzania. Either way, your body's organs each make their demands of you, and you do your best to appease them.

I take rights as an agreed means of behaviour ~ a pact to behave respectfully towards whatever it is you extend the rights towards.

There are differences in magnitude ~ the flea vs the blue whale ~ however, the rights extended to the animal kingdom should cover their right as a population to exist without molestation.

It's ok to swat a mosquito. It's ok to eat a carrot. That's what our bodies demand of us (some of us, at any rate). When we eat all the dodos, shoot all the passenger pigeons, we have ignored their rights to live and the pursuit of happiness as a species.

Human development, as it continues to erode habitat, is one of the main violations of this right. We have created cities that are for the mostpart hostile environments to most other animals (excepting the domesticated, the livestock, the parasitic and the opportunistic - all in all a small number of species).

We could develop cities that don't change the environment in which they situate themselves so radically, that could be home for people & indigenous life, however, the industrial model was not based with this in mind.

something like that...

museum in time, tiger in space

11:41 / 09.08.08

The always-interesting SocialFiction.Org has recently put up a pamphlet called PrimatePoetics (it's a PDF). Here's a bit of the blurb:

Apes in the wild have language and it takes only a small leap of imagination to try to give them a second, human, language. For over forty years researchers have been trying to do this with increasingly good results. Our language, when it is passed on to a different species, becomes a new language. PrimatePoetics is born from the realization that this language should be appreciated in its own right, as the greatest revolution in literature since the invention of written Chinese 4000 years ago. 'PrimatePoetics is Here' is the first primer to this new field. It explains where it comes from, it gives an overview of the field on an ape-by-ape basis and closes with an extensive anthology of relevant scientific and artistic sources.

I've only read the first couple of pages, since I want to print it out before I go through the rest, but I'm really enjoying it so far. I'd never heard of Richard Lynch Garner before, for example - he was a C19th school teacher from Virginia who became obsessed with understanding primate language and ended up going to the Congo to live in a cage in the jungle with a chimp called Moses as a companion.

12:30 / 04.09.08

Spain has just awarded Apes, "Human Rights", according to this Guardian UK article.

13:20 / 15.10.08

Bonobos playing Pacman... a very interesting video, besides, pacman-playing bonobos!

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