NYT Says Animal Rights is “Easy to Mock”

Today’s New York Times presents Adam Cohen, begging to be mocked with his "What’s Next in the Law? The Unalienable Rights of Chimps." I was surprised that the "Editorial Observer" piece was published in its current form because it sounds so ignorant and insulting. But then I realized it’s simply a reflection of what the average educated, well-read person in America thinks.

Let’s deconstruct:

• The backstory is that Spain’s parliament passed a resolution granting legal rights to apes. The resolution calls for "banning research that harms apes," which is like saying they shouldn’t be subject to "unnecessary suffering." What is harm? Why not have a complete ban on research on them? Or say they can only be observed and not touched and their sanctuary environment cannot be altered, leaving ethology the only option?
• Cohen writes:

Granting legal rights to apes is, of course, easy to mock — and animal rights activists don’t do themselves any favors. In media accounts, they usually come off as loopy — whether it is Matthew’s supporters insisting that “everyone is entitled to a fair trial, even chimps,” or Pedro Pozas, the secretary-general of the Spanish Great Ape Project, declaring “I am an ape.”

Here are my questions: Why is it easy to mock? What doesn’t Cohen understand about the right to not be owned and used by another? What isn’t he grasping about the significance of "I am an ape?" Cohen’s unwillingness (I’m trying to be kind and assume it’s unwillingness rather than obtuseness) to comprehend such a simple concept–that I’m assuming he researched in order to write his article–is puzzling.

• Cohen then writes:

The animal rights movement also suffers from association with its least appealing advocates. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals constantly sets back its cause with boneheaded moves, like the ad it ran juxtaposing photos of penned-up animals with starving Jews in concentration camps.

Boneheaded? What has the world come to when the (arguably) venerable New York Times uses a word like boneheaded? Meanwhile, I coincidentally have been watching "Holocaust," which was a miniseries featuring Meryl Streep, James Woods and Tovah Feldshuh that first aired in 1978, and I was thinking about what we do to sentient nonhumans the entire time I was watching. I couldn’t help it. And as I’ve said many times, what we do to sentient nonhumans is worse because we breed them only to exterminate them, and more important, the reality that appropriate moral outrage over what we do to sentient nonhumans is expressed by only a minuscule percentage of humans is frightening.

• Those who refer to Peter Singer as an animal-rights extremist
  are telling you in that moment that they don’t know much about animal
  rights.
• Cohen writes that: "Much of the opposition to animal rights is really economic." Much? I’d make that closer to all. It’s a business, Mr. Cohen.
• Then comes the speciesist bit that confuses this issue: that great apes are like us, and "deserve some respect" because they
  are like us. It seems like such an intellectually-limited phenomenon,
  this inability to go beyond the mirror and consider those who aren’t
  biologically like us but are like us in other important ways. Cohen
  mentions complex communication skills, emotional bonds and the capacity
  to experience loneliness and sorrow, as if my dogs don’t possess those
  attributes.
• Oh, and this is after he uses the adjective "goofier" to describe
  the rhetoric of ape-rights activists. Again, why the insults? So far,
  we and our call for animal rights are "easy to mock," we come off as
  "loopy," some of us are "boneheaded," we "care about animals to the
  exclusion of people" (which is tiresome and demonstrates Cohen knows
  little about us or our cause), and our rhetoric is goofy. All of this
  language tells me more about Cohen, and the New York Times,
  than it does about those humans who realize we aren’t the only
  creatures on the planet capable of suffering and deserving of a life
  free of the ownership of and exploitation by another.
• For a fleeting moment toward the end of the article, Cohen sounds like he might be on track after all with:

It
sounds odd to say that apes have rights — or to call a chimpanzee a
“person.” As a legal matter, though, it is not such a stretch. People
in irreversible comas have rights. Even corporations are recognized as
“persons,” with free speech and equal protection rights, and the
ability to sue and be sued.

It would appear that he sees that though it sounds odd, it really isn’t. Progress? Perhaps.

• Yes, some progress indeed, it seems, with:

Critics
object that recognizing rights for apes would diminish human beings.
But it seems more likely that showing respect for apes would elevate
humans at the same time.

• Ah, but wait. I revoke my proclamation of progress, as Cohen ends in a place that I admit took me off guard.

If apes are given the right to humane treatment, it just might become harder to deny that same right to their human cousins.

First
of all, I think they already have the right to humane treatment, but
the definition of humane can include having electrodes cemented to
their skulls. Didn’t he just sound like he knew what the right in
question was?

Finally, what took me off guard was that for Cohen this issue comes
back around to humans and how it might benefit us. Cohen makes it very
clear: no creature but a human one is worthy of legal rights for their
own sake.

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