Should great apes have rights? This was one of the questions addressed last Sunday (26th July) on BBC1’s The Big Questions, which the BBC describe as their ‘flagship ethical and religious debate programme’.
Quoted from WildlifeDirect’s Gorilla Protection blog:
I was invited (Ian Redmond) to take part not because of my role as Ambassador for the UN Year of the Gorilla, but because I have spent hundreds of hours in the company of apes and have had the good fortune to regard some of them as friends (and an objective assessment of their behaviour suggests that the friendship was mutual).
I guess for any pedantic taxonomists reading this, I should specify ‘non-human apes as friends as well as human ones…’ Great apes share so many characteristics with humans that they are now classed in the same zoological family as us – the Hominidae (find out more in my new book The Primate Family Tree/Primates of the World via www.4apes.com/shop). But paradoxically, in law they have the same legal standing as a piece of furniture; in most countries without wild ape populations, captive apes can be bought and sold legally, and any protection they do have in law is accorded mainly because they are endangered species or because they are animals and covered by anti-cruelty laws. Unfortunately these laws tend to take a rather physical view of cruelty as beating or starving an animal, rather than causing it suffering in other ways – so in law there is nothing to stop the owner of any non-human primate pulling an infant off a mother and selling one or both of them, even though it self-evidently causes great distress to both.
Continue reading this blog at WildlifeDirect
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