After a narrow escape, the Thompson gazelle calls her lawyer, complaining that her freedom to graze wherever she wants has once again been violated. Should she sue the cheetah, or does the lawyer perhaps feel that predators have rights, too?
Absurd, of course, and I certainly applaud efforts to prevent animal abuse, but I do have serious questions about the approach that now has led American law schools to start offering courses in “animal law.” What they mean is not the law of the jungle, but the extension of principles of justice to animals. Animals are not mere property, according to some, like Steven M. Wise, the lawyer teaching the course at Harvard. They deserve rights as solid and uncontestable as the constitutional rights of people. Some animal rights lawyers have even argued that chimpanzees deserve the right to bodily integrity and liberty.
This view has gained some currency. For instance, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia gave a human zoo visitor the right to sue to get companionship for chimpanzees. And over the last decade, state legislatures have upgraded animal cruelty crimes to felonies from misdemeanors.
The debate over animal rights is not new. I still remember some surrealistic debates among scientists in the 1970s that dismissed animal suffering as a bleeding-heart issue. Amid stern warnings against anthropomorphism, the then prevailing view was that animals were mere robots, devoid of feelings, thoughts, or emotions. With straight faces, scientists would argue that animals cannot suffer, at least not the way we do. A fish is pulled out of the water with a big hook in its mouth, it thrashes around on dry land, but how could we possibly know what it feels? Isn’t all of this pure projection?
This thinking changed in the 1980s with the advent of cognitive approaches to animal behavior. We now use terms like “planning” and “awareness” in relation to animals. They are believed to understand the effects of their own actions, to communicate emotions and make decisions. Some animals, like chimpanzees, are even considered to have rudimentary politics and culture.
In my own experience, chimpanzees pursue power as relentlessly as some people in Washington and keep track of given and received services in a marketplace of exchange. Their feelings may range from gratitude for political support to outrage if one of them violates a social rule. All of this goes far beyond mere fear, pain, and anger: the emotional life of these animals is much closer to ours than once held possible.
This new understanding may change our attitude toward chimpanzees and, by extension, other animals, but it remains a big leap to say that the only way to ensure their decent treatment is to give them rights and lawyers. Doing so is the American way, I guess, but rights are part of a social contract that makes no sense without responsibilities. This is the reason that the animal rights movement’s outrageous parallel with the abolition of slavery—apart from being insulting—is morally flawed: slaves can and should become full members of society; animals cannot and will not.
Indeed, giving animals rights relies entirely upon our good will. Consequently, animals will have only those rights that we can handle. One won’t hear much about the rights of rodents to take over our homes, of starlings to raid cherry trees, or of dogs to decide their owner’s walking route. Rights selectively granted are, in my book, no rights at all.
What if we drop all this talk of rights and instead advocate a sense of obligation? In the same way that we teach children to respect a tree by mentioning its age, we should use the new insights into animals’ mental life to foster in humans an ethic of caring in which our interests are not the only ones in the balance.
Even though many social animals have evolved affectionate and altruistic tendencies, they rarely if ever direct these to other species. The way the cheetah treats the gazelle is typical. We are the first to apply tendencies that evolved within the group to a wider circle of humanity, and could do the same to other animals, making care, not rights, the centerpiece of our attitude.
The discussion above (modified from an Op-Ed piece that appeared in the New York Times of August 20, 1999, under the title “We the People [and Other Animals]…”) questions the “rights” approach, but fails to indicate how I feel about invasive medical research.
The issue is complex, because I believe that our first moral obligation is to members of our own species. I know of no animal rights advocate in need of urgent medical attention who has refused such attention. This is so even though all modern medical treatments derive from animal research: anyone who walks into a hospital makes use of animal research then and there. There seems a consensus, therefore, even among those who protest animal testing, that human health and well-being take priority over almost anything else. The question then becomes: What are we willing to sacrifice for it? What kind of animals are we willing to subject to invasive medical studies, and what are the limits on the procedures? For most people, this is a matter of degree, not of absolutes. Using mice to develop new cancer drugs is not put at the same level as shooting pigs to test the impact of bullets, and shooting pigs is not put at the same level as giving a lethal disease to a chimpanzee. In a complex gain-versus-pain calculation, we decide on the ethics of animal research based on how we feel about procedures, animal species, and human benefits.
Without going into the reasons and incongruities of why we favor some animals over others and some procedures over others, I do personally believe that apes deserve special status. They are our closest relatives with very similar social and emotional lives and similar intelligence. This is, of course, an anthropocentric argument if there ever was one, but one shared by many people familiar with apes. Their closeness to us makes them both ideal medical models and ethically problematic ones.
Although many people favor a logical moral stance, based on straightforward empirical facts (such as the oft-mentioned ability of apes to recognize themselves in a mirror), no reasoned moral position seems airtight. I believe in the emotional basis of moral decisions, and since empathy with creatures that bodily and psychologically resemble us comes easily to us, apes mobilize in us more guilty feelings about hurting them than do other animals. These feelings play a role when we decide on the ethics of animal testing.
Over the years, I have seen the prevailing attitude shift from emphasis on the medical usefulness of apes to emphasis on their ethical status. We now have reached the point that they are medical models of last resort. Any medical study that can be done on monkeys, such as baboons or macaques, will not be permitted on chimpanzees. Since the number of ape-specific research questions is dwindling, we are facing a “surplus” of chimpanzees. This is the medical community’s way of saying that we now have more chimpanzees than needed for medical research.
I consider this a positive development, and am all for it progressing further until chimpanzees can be phased out completely. We have not reached this point yet, but increasing reluctance to use chimpanzees has led the National Institutes of Health to take the historic step of sponsoring retirement for these animals. The most important facility is Chimp Haven (www.chimphaven.org), which in 2005 opened a large outdoor facility to retire chimpanzees taken off medical protocols.
In the meantime, apes will remain available for noninvasive studies, such as those on aging, genetics, brain imaging, social behavior, and intelligence. These studies do not require harming the animals. The shorthand definition that I use for noninvasive research is “the sort of research we wouldn’t mind doing on human volunteers.” This would mean no testing of compounds on them, nor giving them any disease they don’t already have, no disabling surgeries, and so on.
Such research will help us continue to learn about our closest relatives in nonstressful, even pleasant, ways. I add the latter, because the chimpanzees I work with are keen on computerized testing: the easiest way to get them to enter our testing facility is to show them the cart with the computer on top. They rush into the doors for an hour of what they see as games and what we see as cognitive testing.
Ideally, all research on apes should be mutually beneficial and enjoyable.