Animal rights advocates have asked New York courts to legally equate four chimpanzees with humans.
LETA, 4 December 2013

At the beginning of December, the organization Nonhuman Rights Project (nonhumanrights.org/) filed several lawsuits in New York state courts, which, among other things, demanded that four chimpanzees currently owned by specific US institutions and private owners be granted certain basic legal rights – in this case, at least partial rights to liberty. In mid-December, the court of first instance rejected the claim, but the organization vows to appeal the ruling.

The project initiator is American lawyer and lecturer at Harvard and several other universities, Steven Wise (Wise), whose best-known book is "Rattling the Cage", published in 2000. In it, he argues that the current treatment of chimpanzees by humans should be considered genocide. Alongside him, the organization is led by the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall. The specialty of the "Nonhuman Rights Project" is that its members are trying to achieve the specific legal recognition of legal rights.

The idea of animal rights is relatively old, but it is difficult to say how old, as there is no consensus among researchers on how old the idea of human rights is. In any case, ancient authors were already discussing the question of what kind of treatment of animals is fair, which is not far from the idea that animals are entitled to something, which, at least today, would also be treated as a question of rights. We can also find discussions that could be described as discussions about rights in medieval animal trials. For example, the claim that animals are entitled to the opportunity to "multiply and reproduce" was used as an argument, which in turn means that insects could not be punished for destroying crops; those were their rights. Of course, it must be noted that this is not about what we primarily understand by rights today, namely, rights that protect an individual, their life and liberty. The idea of individual animal rights formed gradually throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1892, Henry Salt's (Salt) work "Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress" was published, which is one of the first works to speak specifically about animal rights and not just animal welfare. In 1978, UNESCO proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights, but theoretical discussions essentially only really began with the works of Tom Regan (Regan), especially his 1983 book "The Case for Animal Rights".

In 1993, a whole series of authors signed the Great Ape Declaration, which demanded that three rights of these animals be recognized: the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture. Based on the declaration, the "Great Ape Project" (The Great Ape Project, projetogap.org.br/en/) was established, which in many ways resembles Wise's organization and its goals. However, the initial declaration clearly stated that it was about the moral rights of animals. This means that these are unwritten principles which, of course, would be desirable to be reflected in the specific laws of specific countries, but which exist independently of them. Wise, on the other hand, wants to ensure that at least certain animals – chimpanzees – are recognized as having not only moral but also "real", legal, positive rights. Moreover, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of unwritten law seems more promising to him, in which a judge can use analogies between humans and animals more freely than in cases where the law clearly states who can or cannot have rights.

Is the idea of animal rights absurd? At least many critics of animal rights think so, and there are such people even among animal advocates. The reasons for this are various – both practical and theoretical. Among the practical ones, it should be mentioned that the recognition of rights would mean radical changes in human-animal relationships. Theoretical discussions have been most devoted to the question of what kind of being should have rights. For example, does the subject of individual rights have to be a person? The court that rejected the "Nonhuman Rights Project" claim acknowledged that animals are not persons, and legally, until now, only a person can have rights; animals essentially have the status of things in law, which is why, for example, they can be property. Quite a few philosophers also agree that animals are not persons and therefore cannot have rights.

However, I would like to draw attention to the fact that, if not animal rights, then at least the question of animal rights is not simply a misunderstanding or an absurdity. It essentially stems from the development of the Western legal, political, and moral tradition. On the one hand, animal advocates express their feelings, experiences, and insights in the language provided by our culture (which is why the term "animal rights" is often used in a very general and vague sense, which is neither legal nor philosophical). On the other hand, animal rights are becoming a significant issue both because we have abandoned a view of the world in which everything is hierarchically ordered, with everyone assigned their own place, which is predetermined and unchangeable (is an animal really doomed to be just a thing and property?), and because the recognition of rights has always been linked to the question of who is entitled to them (many rights advocates point out the similarity of the animal rights discussion to the discussion of the rights of black people and women). This does not mean that by accepting individual human rights, we are hopelessly forced to recognize animal rights as well. Rather, it should be said that the question of human rights sooner or later leads to questions about what a human is, and that, in turn, to the question of what an animal is. And what is a human?
Article first published in the January 2014 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks