Fair go for chimps and bonobos

What are the legal rights of research chimps and bonobos - and what should they be?

BIOETHICS

Booee was a chimpanzee who was taught American Sign Language. He was subsequently sent to an experimental laboratory in New York and six years later was visited by one of primate researcher Roger Fouts’ students.

Booee had been kept in a cage and infected with Hepatitis C. When the student signed to him, Booee revealed a desire to leave the cage in which he had lived for so long by signing "key out".

But it was seven more years before Mr Fouts could get Booee out of the laboratory.

Are chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimps) owed legal rights to protect them from such treatment?

The American lawyer Steven M. Wise explores this question in his book Rattling the Cage. In a legal sense, chimps and bonobos are ‘things’ rather than ‘persons’ and can be killed, eaten, vivisected, and used in roadside zoos and as pets without the fundamental protection of the legal system.

Mr Wise aims to overturn legal thinking which says that ‘owners’ of chimps have a "property right therein as absolute as that in inanimate objects".

Most of us do not know much about chimpanzees and bonobos. It could come as a surprise to learn that a chimp like Booee can communicate his desperation to be free in a way that qualifies as real (if elementary) sign language, and to do so autonomously.

But that is precisely what many scientists are telling us is possible.

For example, in the late 1980s Sue Savage-Rumbaugh compared the English comprehension of Kanzi, an eight-year-old bonobo, with a two-year-old human girl called Alia.

Both were asked to perform hundreds of tasks like ‘pour the milk on the cereal’, ‘put on the monster mask and scare Linda’, and ‘feed your ball some tomato’.

Kanzi responded correctly to 74 per cent of requests, while Alia was correct 66 per cent of the time. Kanzi outperformed Alia on the more complicated questions.

Sometimes even Kanzi’s failures could be revealing.

Ms Savage-Rumbaugh said when she asked Kanzi to "put paint in the potty", he picked up some clay – a similar play object to paint – and instead put it in the potty.

“I said ‘what about the paint?’,” she said.

“Kanzi put more clay in the potty. I said ‘thank you, but now put some paint in the potty’. Kanzi clearly thought me a little dumb, and so he brought me the potty and placed it right in front of my face so I would see that he had done what I was so persistent in asking for.”

Kanzi’s behaviour is intelligent and autonomous. On the basis of telling evidence like this, Mr Wise argues that we should at least award chimpanzees the basic rights of bodily liberty and integrity that we award to children and adults of widely divergent intelligence.

This could be achieved even if the rights granted to chimps are narrower and less stringent than the rights granted to human beings.

One objection raised against this view is that the laws protecting chimpanzees and bonobos are already adequate or can easily be made adequate. Mr Wise believes current laws will never be adequate in protecting them from being to some degree at the mercy of society.

Some people once thought that slaves were well enough protected, but this clearly was not the case. To regard black-skinned people as property was injustice pure and simple. Chimps are not human, but neither are they mere ‘things’.

Another criticism of Mr Wise’s argument is that legal rights will be extended from chimps to other animals. He suggests it should not be presumed that this will happen but the awarding of legal rights should be examined on a case-by-case basis.

Researcher and long-time chimpanzee welfare champion, Jane Goodall, thinks Mr Wise’s  view is a “major stepping stone along a road that is gradually leading to a new legal relationship between humans and other sentient, sapient life forms”. Only time will tell if she is right.