Rights granted for Great Apes in Spain
Animal Rights Movement | 05.07.2008 03:03 | Animal Liberation | Education | Social Struggles | World
"If you look at the course of western history you'll see that we're slowly granting basic rights to everyone. A long time ago only kings had rights. Then rights were extended to property-owning white men. Then all men. Then wymyn [women]. Then children. Then the mentally retarded. Now we're agonizing over the extension of basic rights to homosexuals and animals. We need to finally accept that all sentient creatures are deserving of basic rights." -- Moby (1)
Great Ape Project:
"This is an important step towards future governmental support for great apes worldwide. Under most government structures, legal rights are the only way to insure that non-human great apes are free from torture, unnecessary death and capture. Simple "animal protection" laws are not enough. We congratulate the hard work and efforts of GAP Spain and its members as well at the political parties that introduced and supported the decision: The Front United Left and Catlunya Party. This is a tremendous accomplishment."
Discover Magazine:
It’s clearly a historic occasion, albeit a weird one: The Spanish parliament has announced its support for granting legal rights to gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. The parliament’s environmental committee has approved resolutions committing the country to the Great Apes Project, an international campaign that aims to provide our closest genetic relatives with the right to life, the freedom of liberty and protection from torture. The Spanish resolutions have majority support, and are expected to soon become law.
“This is a historic moment in the struggle for animal rights,” Pedro Pozas, the Spanish director of the Great Apes Project, told The Times. “It will doubtless be remembered as a key moment in the defence of our evolutionary comrades.”… Mr. Pozas said that the vote would set a precedent, establishing legal rights for animals that could be extended to other species. “We are seeking to break the species barrier — we are just the point of the spear,” he said. (2)
Some animal rights campaigners noted the irony of this breakthrough occurring in Spain, which still permits bullfighting. But for the most part, they celebrated the move as a happy development that will improve conditions for primates within the country. The resolutions require Spain to update its laws within the year to ban using apes in circuses, TV commercials, and films, and will also mandate improved conditions at the nation’s zoos. Finally, the new laws will forbid experiments on great apes. “We have no knowledge of great apes being used in experiments in Spain, but there is currently no law preventing that from happening,” Pozas said. (3)
Great Britain and New Zealand already forbid experimentation on great apes, and several weeks ago a Swiss court halted two experiments on the smaller rhesus monkeys, stating that society would not see enough benefit from the experiments to justify the burden on the animals. (4) But the Spanish resolutions mark the first time a national government has proposed granting legal rights to non-humans. The development raises a host of questions: Could this lead to great apes refugees seeking sanctuary in Madrid? And what does it mean when a chimpanzee in Spain has more rights than a human being in an Iraqi prison? Stay tuned as society gropes for the answers.
More info:
http://www.greatapeproject.org
(1) http://moby.org/info/ar-sa1.html
(2) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4220884.ece
(3) http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL256586320080625
(4) http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080611/full/453833a.html
"This is an important step towards future governmental support for great apes worldwide. Under most government structures, legal rights are the only way to insure that non-human great apes are free from torture, unnecessary death and capture. Simple "animal protection" laws are not enough. We congratulate the hard work and efforts of GAP Spain and its members as well at the political parties that introduced and supported the decision: The Front United Left and Catlunya Party. This is a tremendous accomplishment."
Discover Magazine:
It’s clearly a historic occasion, albeit a weird one: The Spanish parliament has announced its support for granting legal rights to gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. The parliament’s environmental committee has approved resolutions committing the country to the Great Apes Project, an international campaign that aims to provide our closest genetic relatives with the right to life, the freedom of liberty and protection from torture. The Spanish resolutions have majority support, and are expected to soon become law.
“This is a historic moment in the struggle for animal rights,” Pedro Pozas, the Spanish director of the Great Apes Project, told The Times. “It will doubtless be remembered as a key moment in the defence of our evolutionary comrades.”… Mr. Pozas said that the vote would set a precedent, establishing legal rights for animals that could be extended to other species. “We are seeking to break the species barrier — we are just the point of the spear,” he said. (2)
Some animal rights campaigners noted the irony of this breakthrough occurring in Spain, which still permits bullfighting. But for the most part, they celebrated the move as a happy development that will improve conditions for primates within the country. The resolutions require Spain to update its laws within the year to ban using apes in circuses, TV commercials, and films, and will also mandate improved conditions at the nation’s zoos. Finally, the new laws will forbid experiments on great apes. “We have no knowledge of great apes being used in experiments in Spain, but there is currently no law preventing that from happening,” Pozas said. (3)
Great Britain and New Zealand already forbid experimentation on great apes, and several weeks ago a Swiss court halted two experiments on the smaller rhesus monkeys, stating that society would not see enough benefit from the experiments to justify the burden on the animals. (4) But the Spanish resolutions mark the first time a national government has proposed granting legal rights to non-humans. The development raises a host of questions: Could this lead to great apes refugees seeking sanctuary in Madrid? And what does it mean when a chimpanzee in Spain has more rights than a human being in an Iraqi prison? Stay tuned as society gropes for the answers.
More info:
http://www.greatapeproject.org (1)
http://moby.org/info/ar-sa1.html (2)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4220884.ece (3)
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL256586320080625 (4)
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080611/full/453833a.html
Animal Rights Movement
Comments
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"rights if denied others are no more than privileges".
05.07.2008 17:23
If anyone is interested I wrote about the issues from an anarchist (& francomasonic) viewpoint in the article "Simian Reason & Great Apes" 21h23, 27th June -
iosaf - barcelona
How far will they enforce this right?
06.07.2008 15:16
Anon
Good Question. It boggles the mind. Very Good & Big Question.
06.07.2008 20:00
And pretty much passed in the same form. The Spanish state expressed its adhesion to the "Great Ape Declaration". There have been no test cases to determine if those rights are interspecial only or would apply in a human court with simian plaintiff and defendent or has anyone thought of facilitating the organisation of "civilised simian societies" (once they're free) run along our lines complete with little wigs and gavels.
Simians are to be protected against murder by humans except in self-defence. But you raise a very good point. We know Simians murder, organise warfare, feud, torture and rape each other. Recognising that was a similar shift in our philosophical and ethnical understanding of ourselves - as these rights should be understood (a shift in how we consider our own human selves) and I tried to explain at the article I wrote "Simian Reason & Great Apes"
But it is an interesting question and one whose consideration ought be followed with more study of simians thoughts on the matter themselves. Do they want their own plod? barristers? probation officers? social workers? Are they aware that their violence and nastiness has been brought to our attention and upturned academic and moral arguments? Did they get someone to translate Jane Goodall's research on them into sign language?
In the Spanish state they only live in labs and zoos and places of non-tribal tension. The warring Chimpanzees are mostly found in Africa. What we would need is a decent chimpanzee missionary to go off to the chimp tribal regions of Africa and give them their own chimanzee God to believe in.
Do you think they need their own God, Plod and Law system to escape the occassional downside of their near anarchic existence?
You see? We confront core issues through this.
iosaf
I've forwarded the Big Splendid Question. (Coz I want us to answer it)
06.07.2008 21:35
People ask when will chimps vote? People chortle and ask will the Spanish state grant gay marriage to the bonobos too?
But nobody has ever touched in either "our websites" or those of our comrades in animal rights, the beautiful area of anarchistic philosophy I had hoped to see raised by this law change and argued in that article I keep pinging. We didn't raise Simians or lower Humans. We simply saw recognised a self-evident truth of nature. It's only logical that in time that self-evident truth helps us understand the nature of the self-evident lies we endure in the name of "civilisation".
As I explained in the article "Simian Reason and Great Apes"
I've sent a message to Joan Herrera to ask him what he thinks are the possibilities. Considering he's a young republican - post marxist - greenie Catalan he might give me & then ye a thought provoking response. Considering he's also a politician and one of the youngest guns in the parliament (37) he might just avoid publically giving a position.
I'm returning to this thread to push the question and hope now @ long last people will see where we obviously will go with this. The Greater Simians have been communicating with us for forty years. But in our sign languages and on our terms. The silly people who asked about "gay marriage" and "voting" obviously expect a liberated simian to don a suit like the one in my illustration. The theologians who now react to this shifting of the goalposts & the specific point in evolution when humans got their soul (as I asked in the pinged article
Did they really need God or even the rituals which Jane Goodall affirmed Simians had developed to know the difference between right and wrong?
Did we?
There is a wonderful series of novels written by by Robert J. Sawyer.” It depicts the effects of the opening of a connection between two alternate Earths: the world familiar to the reader, and another where Neanderthals became the dominant, sentient hominid. The societal, spiritual and technological differences between the two worlds form the focus of the story.”
I mention this science fiction because Sawyer’s Neanderthals never evolved God.
iosaf