Aping Human Rights

Spain took another step away from reality as a new law was proposed by the ruling Socialist coalition that would give great apes "rights" and place them on the same legal standing as severely retarded children. The new law would eliminate any concept of owning one of the, to put it bluntly, animals, and force zoos to move their apes to state-approved sanctuaries.

Aside from the blindingly obvious fact that apes are not retarded children (and even then, the idea that retarded children and other infirmed persons are essentially state property is appalling) but perfectly normal animals, the proposed law is actually a slap in the face of the very idea of human rights. Human beings are recognised as possessing certain inalienable rights precisely because they are not animals, but are entitled by their creator to their peculiar status that no government has the right to deny or define. By blurring the lines between humans and animals, the Socialists are not elevating the apes to the status of men, but reducing men to the status of apes-- who can then be treated accordingly.

Even if I concede the argument to the Socialists, which I do not, the logical conclusion is an absurdity, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out:

I am here only following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants. I think it wrong to sit on a man. Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse. Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair. That is the drive of the argument. And for this argument it can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress. A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might -- one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children. This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.