Editorial

PICTURE the war-torn faceof an orphaned child in Kosovo. Now imagine the face of a baby chimpanzee in Africa whose mother has just been slaughtered for bushmeat. Both are compelling images of vulnerability amid violence, but if you had to save only one of them, which would it be? 

In New Zealand, such dilemmas are about to become more than just talking points for philosophers and ethicists. The country's parliament will break new ground soon when it votes on a controversial bill designed to give human-like rights to chimpanzees and other apes (see Focus, p 20). 

The move is largely symbolic because New Zealand has no wild apes to protect and has never experimented on apes. But it does raise profound questions about our relationship with animals, not the least of which is whether chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans are really so fundamentally similar to us that they should be turned into honorary humans. 

Whatever rights you give apes, it's hard to imagine many people choosing the chimpanzee over the child. You could view this as mere speciesism--and as such amenable to political re-education. But a far more likely explanation is that despite all the social and physical similarities between humans and our simian cousins, the differences in the way our minds work are simply too great to sustain all but a shallow belief in moral and emotional equality among the great apes. 

Unfortunately, it has become fashionable to stress that chimpanzees and humans must have staggeringly similar psychologies because they share 98.4 per cent of their DNA. But this misses the point: genomes are not cake recipes. A few tiny changes in a handful of genes controlling the development of the cortex could easily have a disproportionate impact. A creature that shares 98.4 per cent of its DNA with humans is not 98.4 per cent human, any more than a fish that shares, say, 40 per cent of its DNA with us is 40 per cent human. 

Nor do these molecular comparisons seem to provide any logical basis for separating off chimpanzees, gorillas and organ-utans from other animals. Gibbons and monkeys share nearly all their DNA with gorillas. And what of tarsiers and lemurs? Take DNA as your measure of sentience and moral worth and the chemical connectedness of life ensures that you soon end up extending honorary personhood to the rat and haddock. 

If, on the other hand, you take language as your measure, then the game changes totally. The test would be whether a creature possessed complex language, which allows the possibility of thinking about thinking. Such a capacity almost certainly changes the kind of consciousness that will be present. If a creature does not possess this capacity for abstract thought--and there is no evidence that chimps and the like do--it is hard to see how it would be able to modify its behaviour and act as a true ethical and moral agent in the world. 

In the end, however, that control over behaviour is precisely what giving human-like rights to animals implies, because if animals have rights which protect them against humans, it is only logical that they should have rights that protect them from each other. If a chimp kills another chimp in the wild, or a human, do we really want to hire a fleet of lawyers? And if we extended honorary personhood to all animals, would the gazelle be entitled to rights against the lion? 

Advocates of the kind of proposal being debated in New Zealand get round such concerns by suggesting we give apes semi-human legal status. But human rights are all or nothing. To think of apes as second-rate versions of ourselves is surely to demean the very creatures we seek to protect. 

Apes have ape minds. It would be sad if we have to pretend otherwise in order to guarantee them a future.