The legal rights of man’s closest cousin

How similar are chimps and humans?

The species are a near genetic match: 98.4 percent of the DNA of the two species is identical. We probably shared a common ancestor until going our own evolutionary ways about 7 million years ago. Since then, the human brain has evolved to be twice the size of a chimp’s. Nonetheless, some scientists say chimps are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas. Nearly a decade ago, a group of 34 biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, ethicists, and other thinkers issued a manifesto declaring that chimps, gorillas, and orangutans “have mental capacities and an emotional life sufficient to justify inclusion within the community of equals.” We should treat the higher primates, contributors to the book The Great Ape Project said, with the same caring we accord to the young or the severely handicapped.

But aren’t chimps animals?

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Some animal rights activists now question whether that distinction is a sharp line or a blurry continuum. Since the 1960s, researchers have explored the ability of chimpanzees to communicate, and some scientists have concluded that the animals have acquired a rudimentary vocabulary, and have the mental capacity of a 3- or 4-year-old child. Renowned primate expert Jane Goodall said her long observations of chimps revealed that they live according to social rules, hug and hold hands and engage in gestures “uncannily like many of our own,” and are capable of love, altruism, joy, despair, and sadness. Harvard University constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe recently told The Wall Street Journal that some researchers are brutalizing chimps in the same way slave owners treated their farmhands.”The whole status of animals as things is what needs to be rethought,” Tribe said.

Are chimps treated as things?

Basically, yes. Most of the 1,500 chimpanzees in the U.S. were bred in the 1980s to study treatments and vaccines for AIDS. But it took years for chimps injected with HIV or a simian equivalent to develop full-blown AIDS, so their usefulness in AIDS research proved limited. That left most of the chimps in a kind of limbo. Medical researchers then began using these leftover chimps in studies of hepatitis, malaria, and other diseases. The chimps are often injected with viruses and vaccines, have their bone marrow and organs biopsied, and are routinely shot with tranquilizer darts. For years on end, they are kept in small cages and are often deprived of any social contact with other chimps. Isolating chimps without family or friends, animal rights advocates say, is a form of torture no less cruel than physical abuse.

Do chimps have any rights?

In theory. The federal Animal Welfare Act bans physical abuse and keeping chimps in cages and conditions that are not “adequate to promote the psychological well-being of primates.” But the law is too vague to be enforced, says the Chimpanzee Collaboratory, a new advocacy group funded by a Seattle software millionaire. This coalition of scientists and legal scholars has drafted a law that would allow nonprofit groups to go to court on behalf of a chimpanzee being abused in captivity.

How has the movement fared?

So far, not so well. The first ape-rights bill was introduced in New Zealand in 1999, but it went nowhere. The magazine Nature lamented that this parliamentary failure probably doomed efforts to get the United Nations to adopt a Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes. There have been victories, though. In 1997, the National Institutes of Health imposed a moratorium on breeding programs. In 2000, Congress passed the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection Act, establishing a few sanctuaries for animals retired from medical labs.

What’s the next step?

Giving chimps legal status as “persons.” Under a model law drafted by the Chimpanzee Collaboratory, judges could appoint a human guardian ad litem, or guardian at law, to sue medical labs, animal trainers, or other chimp owners who violate their basic rights. Damages could be used to send the chimps off to a cushy retirement.

Is that a good idea?

Animal rights advocates say it is the only way to make the government enforce laws against abuse. But many critics say equating chimps with humans is ridiculous. Only humans, most religions teach, are endowed with a soul. And medical researchers argue that giving chimps legal standing would be the beginning of the end of vital research that has already produced vaccines for polio, rubella, and hepatitis B, and saved scores of human lives. If we hire lawyers for chimps, asks Frankie Trull, president of the National Association for Biomedical Research, what’s next—class-action suits on behalf of guinea pigs? “The chimpanzee example is the beginning of what we view as a slippery slope,” Trull said.

The death of Pablo

During his 14 years as a research subject, Pablo was known as Ch-377. The chimp was sent into retirement in 1997, and was moved to the Fauna Foundation near Montreal along with 14 other chimps. There, housed in a 9,000-square-foot building, Pablo and the others found a tiny world different from the 5-by-5-by-7-foot cages in the lab. The chimp house had play rooms and climbing areas, and private cages for solitude. The diet was varied, ranging from fruit to spaghetti and steamed vegetables. There was lots of social interaction, and the chimps spent much of the day playing. But Pablo was weak and ill from the moment he arrived, the sanctuary’s owner, Gloria Grow, told Discover magazine. Finally, Pablo hauled his 200-pound frame up to his nest of blankets atop a 12-foot platform for the last time. He died at 30, although chimps in captivity can live to be 50 or more. A necropsy showed Pablo died of an acute lung infection, although he also had an abdominal infection and mild hepatitis. His internal organs were covered in thick scars. Records showed Pablo had been shot 220 times with tranquilizer darts. He had undergone 32 biopsies—28 on his liver, two on bone marrow, and two on lymph nodes. He had been injected with four test vaccines, one of them for hepatitis. In 1993, he was infected with HIV for another test. After he died, his friends in the chimp house tugged on his arms and tried to wake him up. Then they retreated, hooting. “The hoots blossom into screams,” Discover reported. “And soon the walls of the chimp house echo with the sound of knuckles pounding steel.”