Tag Archives: animal rights

Musings on personhood, humanhood, apes, and rights

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Chimpanzee_thinking_posterIf you pay any attention at all to the animal liberation movement, then you’ve probably heard about great ape personhood.  You’ve probably also heard the case for great ape rights, so I’ll just summarize the main points.  Great apes, especially chimpanzees, have been shown to be very similar to us.  They communicate, use tools, develop lifelong relationships, and can even learn sign language and math, under certain circumstances.  Besides that, chimpanzees share as much as 98% of their DNA with humans, making them genetically closer to us than to gorillas.

This is the problem:  On paper, chimps may be very similar to humans, but there are some complications when it  comes to considering them humans.  Should a pet chimpanzee who attacks a human be tried for assault?  Should a chimp that steals a banana be prosecuted?  Even if we applied our laws to chimps in our society, we could not regulate apes in the wild.  One could argue (and some do) that we should not give them rights without responsibilities, yet how can they have responsibilities that they are not aware of?

This is what it comes down to:  We can’t make non-human primates human.  As genetically close as they are, they are still a different species.  In fact, the idea that we can grant apes humanhood as a privilege is ironically speciesist itself. But is anyone really saying that we should consider chimps to be human?  They are not naturally part of our society, and even non-AR supporters would agree that it works best that way.

To me, great ape personhood is not about recognizing non-human primates as humans. It’s about recognizing them as individuals.  If we consider chimpanzees to be individuals, rather than objects or commodities, then the ways we abuse them are much harder to condone.

We sometimes think that non-human animals, including great apes, only have the rights that we give them.  In other words, we can, if we choose, give chimpanzees the right not to be experimented on, but they don’t have that right unless we magnanimously grant it.  But is it really about granting rights, or is it about recognizing rights that all living things already have?

Debates over rights have always been major political issues, and they will be for quite a while.  But no matter whose rights are in question, if we place ourselves in a higher position, with the sole authority to grant rights, then maybe we aren’t making as much progress as we think we are.  On the other hand, if we accept that living things, including humans, naturally have rights that should be recognized, we really are moving forward.

“Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”

– Albert Einstein

For more info on animal intelligence, look at National Geographic’s page on animal minds.

Chimpanzees declared citizens in Washington town

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The Cle Elum Seven are chimpanzees who suffered in a laboratory before, with the help of PETA, they were given a home at the Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest in Cle Elum, Washington.  Now, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their residence, the City Council has unanimously issued a proclamation that makes the chimps honorary citizens, in addition to commending Cle Elum’s human residents for donating toys, food, blankets, and time to the sanctuary.

While the statement seems to be more symbolic than activist, it is still an encouraging step forward for the rights of non-humans.   Events such as this, combined with Spain’s historic decision to recognize the rights of great apes, show that the primate personhood movement is gaining momentum.

Against cosmetic animal testing? Get the facts on Procter & Gamble

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Procter and Gamble, makes numerous products, including Tide, Dawn, Duracell, Crest, Bounty, Gain, Charmin, Covergirl, to name a few.  Many of us could not imagine going a week without such household staples.  But people who object to animal testing will probably want to avoid them.

Each year, P&G subjects rats, guinea pigs, mice, rabbits, and other animals to a wide array of tests, including skin and eye irritancy, and toxicity.  P&G also conducts experiments with nanoparticles and genetic engineering.

The company claims to strongly support alternatives to animal testing, but its spending does not reflect this claim:  in five days, P&G spends more money on advertising than it claims to have spent in 14 on alternatives to painful and lethal experiments.

This is not a matter of consumer safety versus animal welfare.  As IDA points out,

The fact is that more than 600 companies manufacture safe and effective products that are comparable to Procter & Gamble’s without testing them on animals. Companies with smaller budgets than P&G have been able to develop alternatives to animals while showing a true commitment to eliminating animal testing.

Yes, consumer safety is important. However, safety testing need not involve the harming and killing of animals in order to be effective. The truth is that P&G could stop all animal testing today without hindering anyone’s safety.

Alternatives to the use of animals in product testing already exist.

By the way, cosmetic testing is not required by law in the United States.  In fact, the United Kingdom and the European Union, among others, have already banned cosmetic animal testing.  The U.S. is behind in this area, and the first step to correcting that is educating consumers.

These are the facts about Procter and Gamble’s animal testing policies.  How you react to this information is your choice.  You may want to boycott P&G’s products or fire off a polite but firm letter to the company.  Remember, as a consumer in a free market, you have an important influence.

For more info on P&G’s animal testing, visit P&G Kills.  If you are interested in boycotting P&G, a list of its products can be found here, and on the company’s website.

In addition, CaringConsumer.com offers a complete listing of cruelty free products.

 

Victory for HSUS, PETA: EU bans seal products, striking a blow to Canadian seal hunt

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In its second recent decision on behalf of animals, the European Union has joined the United States, Mexico, and Croatia in closing its borders to the internationally-condemned seal slaughter.  In an article on the HSUS website, Rebecca Aldworth says,

I grew up in sealing country, and I have observed the commercial hunt for 11 years. In that time, I have witnessed cruelty that no thinking, compassionate person could ever accept. It has been difficult, often heartbreaking. But I have always known that in bearing witness to this slaughter, we can stop it…

…This is the beginning of the end for the Canadian seal slaughter. The EU was a primary market for Canadian seal products, and the Canadian government estimates the loss of the EU market will cost Canada’s sealing industry $6.6 million (CAD) annually. Given that the landed value of the Canadian seal hunt last year was less than $7 million, the implications are enormous.

With this ban, the EU joins the United States (which outlawed seal products in 1972) and Mexico and Croatia, which ended the trade in 2006. Soon there will be nowhere left to trade the products of cruel commercial seal slaughters, and seals will be worth more alive than dead.

Seals’ lives have already been saved. Just the promise of an EU ban was enough to drive this year’s price for seal fur down to $15 (CAD) per skin—a decline of 86 percent since 2006.

As a result, many sealers stayed home. Out of Canada’s quota of 338,200 seals, fewer than 60,000 have been killed to date. By the regulated closing date of the seal hunt—May 15—it is likely more than a quarter of a million baby seals will have been spared a horrible fate.

Now that the EU has banned its trade in seal products, countless more seals will live their lives in peace from this year forward.

If you haven’t heard of the Canadian seal slaughter, or if you want to learn more about the campaign against it, visit Protect Seals 2009.

Interestingly, then-Senator Barack Obama sent PETA a letter in 2006 expressing his outrage over the annual seal hunt.  According to ecorazzi,

“I share your concerns about the Canadian seal hunt,” Obama wrote to a member of People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, in the letter, dated April 13, 2006. “As you know, Canada annually opens its eastern waters to commercial seal hunting. The United States and European Union have been unified in their opposition to the slaughter of seals by passing legislation decades ago to restrict the sale of seal-based products within their borders,” Obama wrote. “I certainly believe in the spirit of these acts; the U.S. should not condone this recent Canadian action.”

PETA recently rediscovered the letter in files it keeps of correspondence with the US government and released it today in an effort to drum up support for ending the hunt and remind Obama of his previous sentiments. “The rediscovery of this letter came as a surprise. But we are not totally shocked by what Obama said because so far he has been very responsive on animal rights,” said Dan Mathews, senior vice-president of PETA said to The Star. “But there is obviously an opportunity now for Obama to use his good office to renew and fulfill this pledge. We are anxious to hear a response from the White House.”

So far, no comment from the White House — but it’s great to hear that Obama is already on board for ending this inhumane hunt. Let’s see if his Presidential power moves us any closer to stopping it once and for all.

Flu pandemic may have originated in factory farms

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The rapid spread of the H1N1 virus has the world in a panic, with the WHO giving it a 5 out of 6 “imminent pandemic”phpThumb_generated_thumbnailjpg rating.  In less than a week, the flu infected hundreds and caused numerous deaths.

But where did it come from?  Of course, it originally came from pigs.  Most likely, it came from pigs who were raised in overcrowded, inhumane factory farms.  As a PETA blogger puts it,

Cramming animals by the hundreds or thousands into gigantic, windowless sheds—in which the air is teeming with bacteria and the pigs’ or chickens’ throats are burned by the accumulated waste—is a recipe for spreading virulent diseases.

Simple enough.  For more details, you can read the Humane Society’s informative article.

No doubt, there are other important factors in the spread of H1N1, but the unsanitary conditions of intensive farms definitely play a role.  Besides contributing to the development of diseases, factory farms have plenty of other problems.  If you have any contact with the animal rights community at all, then you have to be aware of the mistreatment of animals that occurs in these farms.  I won’t elaborate, since PETA and the Humane Society have that area covered.

There’s also a problem in the gigantic amount of waste produced by businesses that raise millions of animals.  This waste often accumulates in filthy lagoons, which commonly pollute water sources.  In addition, livestock are big emitters of greenhouse gases, which are fueling climate change.

Still, environmental  concerns are not enough for some people.  But no one can deny the growing number of antibiotic-resistant infections.  If we overuse antibiotics on animals (human or otherwise), the strains evolve to become resistant.  While I do not know much about the human medical field, I can say with reasonable certainty that antibiotics are used too much on factory farms.  In order to keep the animals passably healthy in the conditions mentioned above, agribusinesses pump their animals full of antibiotics, becasue that’s cheaper than improving the farms.

I’m not going to preach about vegetarianism, but it’s important to be aware of the impact of our diet.  Many of the problems that we have today are a result of people pretending that actions don’t have reactions.

Interestingly, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) have introduced a bill that would restrict important classes of antibiotics for use against disease only, taking them out of the realm of subtherapeutic use or growth promotion in agriculture.

You might want to ask your Congressman to support this bill; it seems like preserving the effectiveness of medicine should be a bipartisan issue.