Claiming equal rights for primates

Supporting declaration of the rights of great apes

Description

Campaigning to secure legal and moral recognition of primates as rights-bearing beings, particularly protection from exploitation, confinement, experimentation and habitat destruction. This strategy involves documenting harms, challenging discriminatory laws and practices, mobilizing public and institutional support, and pursuing reforms that establish enforceable welfare, liberty and conservation standards. Its practical aim is to prevent abuse, provide remedies for violations, and ensure primates’ interests are represented in policy and legal decision-making.

Context

Apes share 98% of their genes with humans. They are able to show symptoms of boredom, anxiety and psychosis; they form lifelong attachments and grieve when these are broken; they use language, think aloud, plan ahead, make moral judgements, deliberately deceive others, and remember the names of those whom they have not seen for years.

Apes and humans should form part of the same community of equals. As with young or intellectually impaired humans, human guardians must safeguard the rights and interests of apes and act in an advocacy role on their behalf in the law courts and elsewhere.

Implementation

The Great Ape Project was launched in 1993 by a number of distinguished researchers who argue the need for a revolutionary moral reassessment of human relationship with the apes. They assert that chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans are so similar to human beings that they should be recognized as having similar basic rights -- particularly the rights to life, the protection of liberty and the prohibition of torture. The aim of the project is to liberate the apes, to protect land on their behalf, to end their use in medical research and their appearance in zoos, and to have their rights recognized by law and accepted by the United Nations. The Great Ape Project won the Social Inventions Award 1993 of the Institute for Social Inventions.

Claim

Claiming equal rights for primates is a vital strategy for building a just, ethical society. These intelligent, emotional beings experience pain, fear, and attachment; treating them as disposable resources is indefensible. Legal protections against exploitation, captivity, and experimentation are urgently needed. Defending primate rights also challenges humanity’s broader culture of domination and cruelty. Equality is not a privilege reserved for our species—it is a moral obligation wherever sentient life exists.

Counter-claim

With the human population there is a smooth continuum of mental and emotional aptitudes, from babies and people in comas through to fully self-aware and sentient beings.. It would be impossible and impractical to draw a line anywhere in this continuum, so we rightly do not bother to try. There is a clear discontinuity between primates and humans which can and should be used to set the boundaries of human rights.