Editor's letter: The legal rights of apes

last updated 8 January 2015

On a visit to the Bronx Zoo some years ago, I was drawn to a bored female gorilla who sat by the glass wall that separated her branch of the evolutionary tree from mine. Her hairless palm looked exactly like a human’s, with palmar creases and opposable thumbs, and the similarity inspired me to put my own hand up against the glass. The ape met my gaze, raised her hand, and placed it on the glass opposite mine. She looked steadily into my eyes, and I could feel an intelligence—familiar yet indescribably different—looking back at me. In that instant of connection across barriers, the hair rose on the back of my neck.

As our Briefing explains this week, there is a growing global movement to extend basic legal rights to the Great Apes, so that they can no longer be held in captivity for our amusement or medical experiments. The captivity of orcas and dolphins is also being challenged on moral grounds (see Arts: Film), since they, too, have complex inner lives, social organizations, and individual personalities. At first blush, the idea of rights for apes and orcas may seem extreme, even absurd. Are we not different from—and superior to—animals? But not so long ago, it was just as obvious that only certain males had any right to freedom and autonomy, and that women, children, and “other” races were lesser beings, subject to males’ use and ownership. Such thinking seems barbaric now; human history is a story of an ever-widening moral circle of rights. A century from now, will our descendants still be injecting caged chimps with deadly diseases, or forcing killer whales to perform like circus clowns? I think we can guess.