Dr Zaius gets his start
MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.
Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans. (more...)
posted by e-kvetcher at 6:17 PM
3 Comments:
I gotta say, as a biologist, I'm happy to see the great apes get some rights. Those animals are darn smart (just like dogs, horses, dolphins, and, well, most animals).
Scientific research will be fine without the apes. Although the current red tape makes it hard to experiment on humans, the organism we *should* be working on. Humans are much cheaper than apes, and more relevant.
Rights? I mean human rights are already pushing it, but ape rights?
Now I'm not saying that humans should just treat anything that isn't human however they wish. I'm all for respecting life and the environment. But rights for apes?
There has to be a trade off of interests. For example, let's say that we need to use apes to test some cure for cancer, we have to do what we must. In this case it's in our best interests to use this creature for the advancement of human society. But at the same time I don't think we should be wasteful and indiscriminatory.
I am against unnecessary medical experimentation on ANYTHING. We have buttloads of solid data and the interaction between various compounds and the human body and still we keep on pumping them into people and animals rather than making a comprehensive expert system simulation which we should have begun twenty years ago.
That being said, I would not be against voluntary human experimentation, especially if the results are likely to be gruesome and they sign off on the broadcast rights for television. Might be more entertaining than Dancing with the Stars. More like Mutating with the Stars.
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