Institute For The Future

Simian Rights

This week, the Spanish Parliament approved resolutions calling on the executive to comply with the Great Ape Project, which seeks to extend many human rights to Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Orangutans and Gorillas.

 

"This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity," said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project. [...]
 
The new resolutions have cross-party or majority support and are expected to become law and the government is now committed to update the statute book within a year to outlaw harmful experiments on apes in Spain.

 

The Great Ape Project works for the global change of Great Ape species from being categorized as "property" to a new category which enjoys many rights once reserved for humans, without being technically considered human.

The distinction between "humanness" and "personhood" (which is essentially what this entails) may seem abstract at present, but will become increasingly relevant as we start to see both "uplift" style modifications of animal species (it stands to reason that intelligence augmentation techniques intended for human use will see their first use on animal subjects) and the possibility of machine intelligence.