In a historic vote last month the Spanish parliament’s commission for the environment, agriculture, and fisheries declared its support for The Great Ape Project – a proposal to grant rights to life, liberty, and protection from torture to our closest nonhuman relatives: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans. Other countries, such as New Zealand and the UK, have taken steps to protect great apes, but no national parliament has declared that any animal could be a person with rights.
Keeping great apes in captivity will be allowed for purposes of conservation only, and then under optimal conditions for the apes. Moreover, the resolution recommends that Spain take steps in international forums to ensure that great apes are protected from maltreatment, slavery, torture and extinction.
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While Spanish parliamentarians were sympathetically considering the rights of animals, in Austria 10 leaders of lawful animal welfare organisations were beginning their fifth week in prison. Police had roused people from their beds, put guns to their heads and seized computers and files, disabling the animal-rights movement on the eve of it launching a new initiative to enshrine the protection of animals in the Austrian constitution. The leaders are being held without charge under a law aimed at members of criminal organisations such as the mafia, and a court has remanded all 10 to be held until September.
One, Martin Balluch, has been given a 1,500-page police file to justify his arrest. In the file his name is mentioned only three times, all in connection with media interviews or articles. Ironically Balluch, a brilliant man with doctorates in both physics and philosophy, is one of the foremost spokesmen in the worldwide animal rights movement for pursuing the nonviolent, democratic road to reform. In recent years, Austrian animal welfare organisations have been remarkably successful in persuading voters and legislators to support laws phasing out cages for egg-laying hens, cages for raising rabbits for meat, and raising animals for fur. As Balluch writes: “A law banning a whole industry does far more economic damage to the animal abuse industry than anything else the animal movement could do.”
Of great apes and men by Peter Singer.
