Rattling the Cage: toward legal rights for animals
Daniel Wise (2000)
270 pp.
Rating: 5 of 5
I’m not sure whether the whole vegetarian/animal rights thing should be a dot in the Connect The Dots network of ideas. While I personally gravitate towards these ideas as illuminative of our sense of what it is to be human and act morally in the world, the truth is that I’m not so sure how easily I can connect this dot to the others (eg. globalization, masculinity, the rise of conservatism) that do seem to all go together much better. Maybe I’ll figure it out before I give up on this blog!
At any rate, this is an excellent book. I had a chance to meet Jane Goodall several years ago, who handed this book out to the group I was in. Took me this long to get around to reading it. Shame on me, because it’s an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book. Although the book Is putatively about making the legal, scientific and moral arguments about why chimps and bonobos should be consider legal (non-human) persons (rather than property, their current status), the book to me was really about having to understand what it means to be human. Because to understand how close these animals are to us, it’s necessary to understand what make us, well, us (human beings).
What is usually understood to distinguish humans from other animals is consciousness. Most importantly, an awareness of self as conscious, as well as an awareness that others are conscious as well; as well as a tertiary awareness that those others are aware of your own consciousness. Just think about it, we wouldn’t get very far if we were only aware of our own consciousness (see Mind Wide Open).
After some drier legal chapters (skippable!), Wise gets into discussing the wide variety of conclusive research that shows that chimps (and bonobos, but I’ll just say ‘chimps’ from here) raised in supporting, language-rich human environments, have this ability (and in spades!). In fact, as you’d expect, the secondary level of awareness is also proven in cats, dogs, parrots, pigs, dolphins… the list goes on). What makes chimps somewhat different than these others, is that they can master a language – sign language. So they can also communicate to us. Dramatic evidence of their consciousness is given in the book, which seems to pretty conclusively show that these chimps reach at least the developmental stage of a human 3 year old.
Only a few chimps have been raised in this supportive environment, but all chimps have this capacity. Unfortunately, most chimps are endangered – entirely from humans, who hunt them for food, who torture them in medical experiments, who jail them in zoos. You really can’t look at chimps the same after you read this book.
The irony, of course, is that many humans who lack the abilities of these chimps – say, humans in deep prolonged comas, the profoundly mentally retarded, and in many place, unborn humans – have many more rights than these chimps do. Of course, I am not arguing for reduced rights for any humans. I'm saying it's time to take a cold hard look at how we are treating other conscious species.
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