Maybe a reminder of what it really is about is needed again, although you just have red it above:
Quote:
Under current legal systems throughout the world, great apes are considered mere property, like a chair, a car, or a computer. Their owners and others can do virtually anything they wish to them without significant repercussion. As such, granting them legal rights is the only way to ensure the protections necessary to guarantee great apes freedom from torture, mistreatment and unnecessary death.
To be clear, the extension of legal rights to great apes does not mean that they would share the same rights now available only to humans. No, chimpanzees won’t be seen in voting booths. Rather, these laws simply recognize basic legal protections consistent with biological and scientific evidence that great apes possess a high level of consciousness and self-awareness similar to the level found in human children. They experience intense emotions such as fear, anxiety, happiness as well as grief over the loss of loved ones. They develop long term relationships, become depressed when separated from their families, can independently solve puzzles that confound human children, and can create and use tools. They recognize the past and plan for their future. They hug and kiss to make up. They learn to communicate in a different language, express their feelings and desires, and unilaterally teach their new language to their children. [...] We do not have to choose between helping humans or helping other animals – we can do both. [...] Recognizing rights of great apes does not mean that they would all be set free. Nor does it rule out the possibility of euthanasia if it is in the interest of an individual ape whose suffering cannot be relieved. Rather, these fundamental rights would simply require “owners” to become guardians with a legal responsibility to consider each great ape's best interest at all times. For example, great apes that are tortured or mistreated would be entitled to removal to a healthier environment, much like a child who is abused.
We stand at an important crossroad. The choices we make will be a revelation of our true moral character of humankind. Are we too self-absorbed to stop the oppression of those beings who, despite an undeniable ability to experience fear and a conscious awareness of their plight, cannot speak for themselves?
|
So - what's wrong with that?
My impression is for some people it is more about their concern hat their belief of man being the heart and centre of all life, creation, cosmos, maybe tells more about man's egocentric selfishness than about reality. So they react hypersensitive to everything that questions man to stand unique in the centre of all creation. Institutional religions of course does not help a lot here, since they declare all universe to be revolving around man and his ideas that replaces reality. But as a matter of fact, the human race is an evolutionary experiment only, one amongst thousands and hundreds of thousand of others on this mplanet, and it is one far from proving to be a successful design. Very possible that homo sapiens sapiens will prove to be a blind alley only, and will be skipped from further attempts to develope it. I easily could think about far more survivable and long-living, thus successful designs. Cockroaches, for example, and certain types of unicellular organisms. We still need to prove that we really are so fantastic as we think of ourselves. From a non-human point of view, so far all we have acchieved is to bring the art of killing ourselves to perfection and messing this planet up completely, at the cost of all other life-forms on it, and in the name of our glorious "ideas". Not a too impressive bilance, I think. Show me another life form here on Earth that joins us in these two follies.