I read an article the other day reporting on the thoughts of one Michael Hanlon, the science editor of the London paper the Daily Mail in which he posits the question of the ethical treatment of animals, especially animals of high intelligence such as Chimpanzees. Hanlon states that science is constantly discovering that animals are far cleverer than we had previously thought. Whereas 50 years ago scientific teaching said humans were unique for having speech and self-recognition, those ‘truths’ have been shown to be false. The latest research shows that chimpanzees, our closest cousins, can comfortably out-perform humans in memory-based tests. Hanlon goes on to argue that because our knowledge of sentience outside of humanity it is becoming a more pressing issue to determine if we should give animals such as chimpanzees ‘human’ rights, since our whole notion of human rights hinges on our sentience and intelligence. He argues that the idea that there can be no rights without responsibilities is invalid based on the fact that we grant human rights to the senile, mentally infirm and babies without any expectation of responsibility on their part.
I want to contrast those ideas with some very ugly facts about the very children that we supposedly grant rights to. Here in New Zealand we have the third highest rate of child murder in the world. The largest part of the child murder statistics involves the native people of New Zealand, the Mãori. The group makes up only 15% of the country’s population, but in 2005, fifty percent of people sentenced for “male assaults female” assaults were Mãori. As to the percentage of children killed by their parents or caregivers, there seems to be no one who’s willing to give out that figure on a race basis, but in the twelve years I’ve lived here, at least ten children have been killed by their parents or caregivers, and only one of those was not Mãori. Hardly a month goes by here that another dead child in the headlines isn’t a reality.
Given the horrific family assault figures here overall, I can’t even begin to imagine that most people would be concerned in the least with the idea of rights for intelligent animals. We also have a high rate of animal torture and killing here, especially of cats. Don’t get me wrong, I love New Zealand, and over all I think the residents of this country are fine people, but we do seem to have more than our share of sick puppies here.
I’m not sure what I’m driving at, to tell the truth, other than that only the most well-adjusted, intelligent and evolved citizens of any place on earth could even begin to consider the ethics of animal rights in the face of major dysfunction within the community of it’s own people. While I find Michael Hanlon’s ideas interesting and worthy of consideration, I doubt very much anything will done to advance these ideas until we can clean up the mess that our society is in first.
