Chimps Deserve Human Rights, Group Says

In Vienna, Australia a bunch of animal rights activists wants to legally declare a 26-year-old male chimpanzee a person. The group say they don't want to give him voting rights just certain human rights. There is one problem here though. Animals can never be considered human for certain basic fact--they don't have free will. That is what separates mankind from the rest of the animal world. For a while it was thought that man was the only animal that used tools. Then researchers found that chimps can use tools. They observed a chimpanzee using a stick to eat termites.

What these animal rights activists are doing is personifying the chimpanzee. Using an exact quote one of the activist said: "He has a real personality. It strikes you immediately: This is an individual. You just have to look him in the eye to see that.'' Anyone with a pet knows what I am talking about. You treat it as a member of the family. I have had parakeets and a cockatiel for pets. I sometimes thought they acted like people. Especially, my first parakeet. But they are not. Yes, animals have distinctive personality, but having a personality does not make one a person. I would think you can have certain safeguards against animal cruelty without declaring chimps as people.

One final thought. The lawyer hired by the animal rights group said: “Chimps share 99.4 percent of their DNA with humans. OK, they're not homo sapiens. But they're obviously also not things." Well, human fetuses have 100% human DNA and are not considered human by pro-abortionists. To paraphrase the lawyer, human fetuses are not things either. Something to ponder.