Does Nonhuman Ape Personhood Contradict Egalitarian Animal-Rights Principles? The Top Ten Questions
(Answered by Lee Hall, January 2007)
In a society where corporations benefit from legal personhood, yet the conscious beings they routinely commodify do not, GRASP accepts and supports any campaign in the world that strives to remove one, some, or any class of conscious nonhumans from the category of property -- as long as that campaign is careful not to sell other animals down the river. We understand and acknowledge that this incremental path to animal rights is imperfect; every example of the evolution of legal rights so far has been imperfect.
That said, taking animals' interests seriously is morally consistent with the values that inspired the progress of constitutional law thus far. It is compatible with our intolerance for racism, sexism, and the abuse of prisoners and the vulnerable. Further, such a movement would exemplify what can be beautiful and inspiring about human culture and resonate with the noblest aspirations of humanity, as evidenced by the very term "humane."
Nevertheless, the idea will be frightening to most people in the beginning. Thus, legal personhood will be incremental (that is, one class of plaintiffs at a time) -- as long as we're involved in the legal system of rights that prevails at present.
So any class of conscious beings that we can remove from property status should be removed as soon as possible. But overall, legal personhood is a slow process.
We strongly urge all of our readers, supporters (and detractors, as the case may be) to support the vegan movement -- to object, that is, to the human war on other animals by opting out of industries that breed, buy, sell, and exploit conscious beings.
One subset of our work, which will operate as a primate-advocacy project under the auspices of Friends of Animals (deemed by GRASP the most clearly abolitionist organizational base in the animal-advocacy movement), involves pressing for all-ape legal personhood. This would straightforwardly put other apes off-limits for human use, whether for experiments, for entertainment, for the pet trade, or other advantages. It is based not on hierarchy (this is where we diverge from the Great Ape Project, or GAP), but on the reality that people already view other ape communities as clearly self-aware and as members of cultures.
Although that popular view of nonhuman apes reflects, and is unquestionably based on, the idea that apes are similar to us, that’s not why we have started here. We’d be equally amenable to a case on personhood for burros or bats. We view all conscious animal life as having interests relevant to that consciousness -- interests that should be respected. The popular view does, however, highlight the point at which exclusive human personhood -- based on some supposed line between ourselves and everyone identified as other-than-human -- is the most vulnerable to early change.
Rights theorists tell us the whole thing is about fairness: the law should be treating similar cases similarly. If most people already accept that other ape communities are similar in many ways to ours, then starting with an ape case makes sense. It does not make sense to think that rights rules could be, for once, extended beyond humanity and then become a thicker wall than they are right now. The reverse is true; they’ll become more flexible in a way humanity has never in legal history seen or allowed.
One more point. In international human rights, there’s a universally accepted norm condemning genocide, directly or indirectly. It is not a moment too soon to expand this concept to other apes still left on the planet; and respecting their environmental needs would be immensely helpful to other beings living in the apes’ natural territories.
Asked i n an interview in The Vegan (Autumn 2006) about a scenario where other animals are permitted to live in freedom in their own territories, Peter Singer answered:
Tragically, we’ve destroyed so much habitat that for some species, this is not a great option. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans, for example, have few safe havens now. So -- in the real world, anyway, rather than in some utopia -- it might still be best for some species to live under human control and protection.
What’s truly tragic is Singer’s resignation to the idea that habitat, and with it other animals’ freedom, will be gone, and it’s not worth struggling for it. This attitude translates into terrible decisions parading as activism, as advocacy groups increasingly view commercial institutes as appropriate for other animals, apes included. In 2006, PETA called a storage site for chimpanzees owned and used for research purposes by the U.S. National Institutes of Health “a naturalistic sanctuary in Louisiana”. The group also touted the San Diego and Detroit zoos as appropriate housing for apes discarded from cognition research!
Unfortunately it seems that humans are, in a sense, trying to domesticate other apes, thinking that they will be exceptionally useful to us as they can count money and operate keyboards. They are particularly susceptible to being wiped out except insofar as they can be useful underclass of hominids.
GRASP will not stop pressing for apes’ autonomy as long as there are any ape communities left on Earth; but why isn’t GAP’s international president exerting energy to voice the importance of respecting ape communities?
Because people in at least three regions of the world ( New Zealand, Spain, and Britain) are poised at the verge of extending legal personhood to other apes, we are lending our pressure to this, even though in each case it is pressed by GAP. Our active presence means the media can, with public support, hear a voice that’s mindful of vegan values, unlike the voice of GAP. Currently, the media refer to GAP’s positions on ethics; if support for GRASP spreads, the public dialogue will benefit. And should a court case be brought by current GAP proponents, it’s critical that another voice be present to explain, wherever possible, what the animal-rights position is really about. In other words, accountability is needed in the primate advocacy movement. To the best of our ability, we will provide it.
Here are our answers to the most common questions on the issue of avoiding the reinforcement of hierarchy. GRASP thanks Randy Sandberg of San José, California for contributing the general question for our consideration. The reader should consider the responses, and GRASP itself, part of a work in progress.
Question 1: Shouldn’t you wait to do a personhood case only if all sentient beings benefit simultaneously?
If you believe that only a case that extends personhood to all animals or none at all should be undertaken, we respect your view, but we don’t share it. Are you really prepared to say that:
- You would have declined to work in, support, or endorse the emancipation of slaves through the 13 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or the prohibition against slavery as a norm in international law?
- You would not work in, support, or endorse today’s human anti-slavery movement?
- You would ask people in such a movement to stop their work?
If you are not prepared to make such statements, then how can you be against legal recognition of nonhuman ape personhood? That would itself be a species bias.
Question 2: But then maybe we should say, just don’t work in the sphere of legal rights at all.
A question for readers who feel this way: Would you not dismantle corporate personhood? We deal with this system of rights in some way every day. It’s not possible to simply ignore it.
Question 3: Does GRASP assume it is acceptable to exploit nonhuman animals other than great apes?
GRASP explicitly works for rights of great apes, and, by extension, small apes. Thus, we focus on bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans, siamangs, and gibbons. We also actively support the movement to stop vivisection and the pet trade, zoo and entertainment, and other uses of all primates, human and otherwise. We now feel the time is ripe to be inclusive of all primates given that a panel of 22 scientists, lawyers, and philosophers in 2005 reported the results of a debate, continued for more than a year, over the wisdom of inserting human stem cells into monkey brains, during which time the team's scientists weren't sure how to ethically separate humans from other primates.
That’s our specific focus. We do not support the exploitation of any conscious being or class of beings and we are publicly outspoken about it. We are committed to the concept that beings do not need to be “like us” to be persons; they merely need be conscious of their life experiences. We are keenly aware of the danger of struggling against a certain hierarchy only to replace it with another one. At the same time, we are fully committed to the support of any conscious life that can get through the door. Ultimately, yes, we’d like to remove the entire door. That’s why we urge constant work for the spread of vegan values, and the bulk of the hours put in by all GRASP contributors is overwhelmingly for animal rights generally, based on a popular vegan movement.
An advocate can support particular emancipatory advances, such as the extension of legal rights to nonhuman primates, without undermining animal rights in general; this, in our view, is a reasonable allocation of resources. The mission of GRASP itself is concentrated on securing legal recognition of the rights of nonhuman primates to live in their own ways; but not without being mindful of the issues of animal rights generally.
We know that t he use of nonhuman animals underlies an enormous proportion of our current economic and social interactions. The law will embrace animal rights only after a paradigm shift, or a profound change in our world view.
Question 4: In 2006, Gary Francione described GAP in a way that indicates it’s hopelessly hierarchical. GRASP is different, then?
We’ve long acknowledged the problems with GAP; that’s why, after originally supporting that project, we started GRASP in 1999.
Surely primate personhood isn’t a more problematically “hierarchical” means of incremental change than the removal of hens from battery cages to sheds -- an intervention that Francione has in certain circumstances approved. [1] For the freedom GRASP demands is not a matter of expanding the space allotted to exploited primates by human keepers. It means no exploitation.
There might be an honest debate possible on the issue, but GRASP believes that concepts of "abolition" or even diminished property rights over beings left under corporate control is illusory. As regards animals in agribusiness, the view of both GRASP and Friends of Animals is that we should eat something else and get serious about habitat. More space for chickens or other animals in agribusiness actually usurps habitat.
This view is not offered as a dismissal the overall point of Francione’s abolitionist work -- which has played a key role in our own foundation and evolution -- but rather to strive to meet the best reading of the abolitionist view. “The efforts of animal advocates,” Francione wrote in the 2006 critique, “ought to be directed at promoting veganism and the incremental eradication of the property status of nonhumans.” We agree.
Question 5: Yet unlike Francione, when discussing the criterion for animal rights, you seem to prefer the word consciousness to sentience.
Consciousness is enough, yes. Most animal-advocacy writing focuses on sentience, which, in turn, is often described as the ability to feel pain. But that, simply put, means that the individual experiences life. Pain is morally relevant because it’s perceived; it is evidence, that is, of a consciousness.
Sentience is now problematic, as it is so interwoven with the reduction-of-suffering paradigm of Peter Singer and activists who work for husbandry adjustments. The book Capers in the Churchyard puts the point this way:
The reduction of suffering, when it takes over as a mission, becomes, for the objects of this advocacy, a reduction to suffering. And this…misses animals on their own terms, for the lives and interests of other animals constitute something far more wondrous and more complex than the sum of harms to which we subject them.
This is why we believe it’s helpful to see the locus of respect as consciousness .
Question 6: You include a model case for ape personhood on your site. Is the “Case of Evelyn Hart” hierarchical?
Evelyn Hart’s case was written in the late 1990s and published in 2000. I am one of its authors; today, I’d spend less time considering the cognitive research done on nonhuman apes.
But Hart’s case does state -- explicitly -- a point that’s very much aligned with what GRASP promotes today: the idea that it shouldn’t take proven cognitive complexity for such a case to prevail. One prior case on which Hart relies involves Nicholas Romeo, who, with a cognitive capacity deemed equal to that of a baby, could yet obviously feel and experience being alive. We noted that Romeo, in the 1980s, was rightly considered eligible for constitutional personhood, and pointed out that it would be fair and reasonable to extrapolate this finding -- unconditionally -- outside the supposed line between humanity and other species.
Thus, here is what the Bibliographic Essay in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Cass R. Sunstein & Martha C. Nussbaum eds., 2004) says about Hart’s case:
... Steven M. Wise argues that animals that are cognitively similar to humans should be accorded legal rights. Wise's position is similar to that proposed in The Great Ape Project, which maintains that cognitive and genetic similarities to humans justify extending legal protection to the great apes. In "From Property to Person: The Case of Evelyn Hart" (Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal; 2000), Lee Hall and Anthony Jon Waters argue that the cognitive attributes of the great apes are sufficient for legal personhood, but that sentience is the only characteristic that should be regarded as morally necessary.
Question 7: Evelyn Hart relies on a legal guardian. Does this mean GRASP’s work supports the guardianship campaign for dogs and cats, or some kind of rights for them?
No, and advocates create a mess when they do that, because the best thing animal-rights activists could do for dogs and cats would be to actively question the breeding of them. Animal rights for dogs and cats makes no sense. What’s consistent with the animal-rights view is to look after domesticated dogs, cats, rabbits, and so forth who are already born. We take their welfare -- true welfare -- entirely seriously. We think animals whose lives depend on us should be valued, so, for example, we strongly support the no-kill movement. But don’t misunderstand this as holding that looking after a dog is itself about animal-rights theory. Think about it: Would you feel respected if some other species talked about your rights when the truth of your situation was that you could not even urinate unless they got up and let you do so?
So we think it muddies the waters when abolitionists bring domestic dogs into arguments about rights. Wolves (like apes), as long as they and their habitats exist, could benefit from legal rights -- not dogs. In “Taking Sentience Seriously” (Journal of Animal Law and Ethics, 2006), at page 9, Francione writes:
Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at the entire enterprise of linking the moral significance of nonhumans with cognitive attributes beyond sentience, rather than trying to determine whether some nonhumans have such cognitive attributes or have them in a way that makes them sufficiently similar to humans to merit moral and legal personhood .
As a preliminary matter, there is a sense in which the similar-minds theory is decidedly odd. Is there anyone who has ever lived with a dog or cat who does not recognize that these nonhumans are intelligent, self-aware, or emotional, even though they are more genetically dissimilar to us than are the great apes?
We would agree that dogs and cats have moral significance, but the trouble with using dogs and cats with whom people live in this particular picture is that some readers will not be entirely sure whether Francione is suggesting here that pets could and should have rights or not.
In this same essay, at page 17, Francione does say abolitionism would “require that we abolish--and not merely regulate--our exploitation of nonhumans and that we stop bringing domestic animals into existence to serve as means to human ends” and at note 45, Francione indicates that “domestication cannot be justified”. But as some lawyers believe that achieving “rights” for domesticated dogs makes sense, we’re concerned that placing the dog and cat illustration in the text -- like a number of similar, recurrent examples in the abolitionist literature -- unwittingly contributes to the confusion. It would, we think, be better to show that a free-living bird or bat is self-aware, rather than run the risk of conflating the self-awareness we see in domesticated animals in human settings with the capacity to benefit from autonomy.
GRASP’s case is for freedom, so it could be about any animals who could, if not captured and used, live their lives according to their own terms. That is, non-domesticated. An ape still can, of course; and so can other nonhuman primates.
Question 8: What would you tell us explicitly about your perspective of the book The Great Ape Project? Where exactly does GRASP part ways with GAP?
As your question notes, the Great Ape Project started with a book, The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (Paola Cavalieri & Peter Singer eds., 1993; reissued 1994). The authors contribute a variety of viewpoints, ranging from anthropocentricism to a broad-based animal-rights orientation. Overall, the book lucidly demonstrates that continuing to use the other apes for experimentation, for teaching, for trade in their body parts, and in the entertainment industry is a mistake. Moreover, the book inspires us to broaden our definition of slavery.
The book’s single most obvious flaw is the inconsistency evident in a few chapters that present the work of researchers who have used, for example, the linguistic talents of other apes to advance their own careers. Other sections of the book, including a chapter vividly comparing the non-human and human slave trade, underscore that flaw with haunting sensitivity.
The book developed, in a scattershot manner, into a volunteer-driven project called GAP. Unfortunately, the people who continued with GAP’s work (many of whom weren’t involved with the book) have offered no consensus that equality beyond humanity should be infused with a generous spirit, inclusive of the animal-rights position generally.
Many of GAP’s current proponents frame the campaign as one of exclusive hominid rights. Some, notably Steven Wise, in the book Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (2002), rank several animals -- including great apes, dolphins, parrots, and domesticated dogs -- on a scale as candidates for legal personhood, based on their having passed learning tests and sharing a certain amount of DNA with humans. The scale gives humans a number corresponding to full eligibility for rights, and places all other animals at specific points lower in the numerical ranking. If someone uses Steven Wise's theory of personhood, nonhuman animals will probably wind up no better off than they are now, because that theory unquestionably reinforces a pro-human hierarchy. On a related note, w e are troubled at the interest various current GAP proponents have cultivated regarding testing of nonhuman animals in homes, laboratories, and zoos or similar settings in order to further studies of language and other cognitive processes. In our view, it’s now obvious that these studies are invasive, and they should be stopped.
Other GAP proponents have little interest in such issues as why ranching in Africa should be a focus of their concern and interventions. Jane Goodall, who wrote the book’s first chapter, has promoted both zoos and animal products in many ways.
One more thing, and this is what caused an irredeemable rift between GRASP and Friends of Animals on one hand and GAP on the other: Under no circumstances do we condone “sex” between human and nonhuman animals. Peter Singer wrote a book review and commentary in 2001 called “Heavy Petting” which condones “sex with animals” if it is not “cruel”. This claim misses the point that such activity always occurs in an unbalanced relationship between humans and other animals. As Tom Regan stated at the time, animal-rights theory “manifestly, categorically” disapproves of this view; likewise, GRASP finds it completely unacceptable, and frightening. When “Heavy Petting” appeared, it was clear that Singer would never be able to seriously apply rights theory to any nonhuman being, including apes. GRASP then publicly called for Peter Singer to resign from the position of president of the GAP-International. (Singer did not step down.)
Question 9: So at the same time you support some of GAP’s interventions, overall you think their effect betrays its own goal?
Correct! The United States (and Jane Goodall, unfortunately) are, in our view, delaying nonhuman primate personhood. One illustration of this is GAP’s and Goodall’s refusal to oppose the Chimpanzee Health, Maintenance and Improvement Act, known as the CHIMP Act . Passed and signed in late 2000, that law condones chimpanzee vivisection.
Even if that weren’t the case, in the United States the current makeup of the Supreme Court would be an obstacle to nonhuman rights. We have, as individuals, therefore put far more energies into the broad base of animal rights, and that is vegan education. That's work that can be effective every day we engage in it. Whether or not we see legal personhood through the courts, we can make animal rights happen through people power. In a word, veganism.
Question 10: Won’t rights make apes an elite class?
Currently, apes are property and as long as this continues they’ll be considered a servile class. We just touched on a recent illustration of this reality: the passage of the CHIMP Act. The law removes "surplus chimpanzees" from U.S. biomedical research when they are "no longer necessary" for that purpose. The Act fails to mandate their permanent safety and enables the warehousing of chimpanzees at the discretion of the research community, which it benefits financially. It also provides for the possibility of resuming tests in various circumstances.[2]
GAP didn’t oppose this; indeed, GAP's proponents, led by Jane Goodall, generally supported it. Thus, when really tested, GAP was willing to condone the legal classification of nonhuman apes as appropriate research specimens. The legislation flies in the face of animal rights; nothing in its language acknowledges nonhuman great apes as anything but commodities. This is unacceptable to GRASP and just the sort of thing we’re working to change.