Evolution to the Rescue for Abused Ape

The UK Guardian reports that Austrian courts are being asked to grant human status to an ape to allow it to sue a company for importing it into Austria for medical research.  In 1999, New Zealand granted “non-human hominid” status to apes to protect them from maltreatment, but this case attempts to give full human rights to apes to allow them to initiate their own lawsuits.  Animal rights advocates base their case on the similarity of humans to apes:

One of their central arguments will be that a chimpanzee’s DNA is 96 – 98.4 per cent similar to that of humans – closer than the relationship between donkeys and horses.  They will cite recent findings that wild apes hunt with home-made spears [2/01/2007] and can fight battles and make peace.

Activists are trying to ditch the “species barrier” that allows such discrimination.  The article quotes Sommer, an evolutionary anthropologist, saying: “It’s untenable to talk of dividing humans and humanoid apes because there are no clear-cut criteria – neither biological, nor mental, nor social.’”

Having rejected the Biblical account of man being created in God’s image, it is easy for animal rights activists to claim that there are no clear-cut criteria between apes and humans.  Given the logical starting place of evolution, such a deduction follows.  Unfortunately, because evolution is trusted as science instead of philosophy, a large number of people have bought into the whole package.  This one is based on flawed statistics.  The 98% similarity figure, often echoed in the news media, is both false and misleading (09/23/2002, 10/25/2002, 08/22/2006).  Depending on what parts of the genome are compared, you can derive almost any figure you want
    The Animal Rights movement is a study in itself, but Wikipedia gives us a brief introduction:

Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the movement to protect non-human animals from being used or regarded as property by humans.  It is a radical social movement insofar as it aims not only to attain more humane treatment for animals, but also to include species other than human beings within the moral community by giving their basic interests � for example, the interest in avoiding suffering – the same consideration as those of human beings.  The claim is that animals should no longer be regarded legally or morally as property, or treated as resources for human purposes, but should instead be regarded as legal persons.

Protecting animals is one thing, but giving them human legal status is quite another.  We all support the idea of protecting animals from abuse, but leveraging that support into a law to humanize animals is a bit out of bounds.  Nowhere in the Bible is there any indication that God holds animals to a moral standard.  The application of moral standards to animals is a result of the evolutionary doctrine that we are just smart animals.  Notice that their use of “morally” in the above quote is applied only to humans, not animals.  We know from experience that animals do not behave morally, and we have no expectation that they will.  How then can they be included in the “moral community”?  We are the moral community, not animals
    Wikipedia continues with an interesting statistic that does not bode well for our legal future as humans, and sheds some light on the ultimate Animal Rights goals:

Animal law courses are now taught in 79 out of 180 United States law schools, and the idea of extending personhood to animals has the support of some senior legal scholars, including Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School.  The Seattle-based Great Ape Project is campaigning for the United Nations to adopt a Declaration on Great Apes, which would see gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos included in a “community of equals” with human beings, extending to them the protection of three basic interests: the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture.  This is seen by an increasing number of animal rights lawyers as a first step toward granting rights to other animals.

When rights are granted to the Great Apes, will they be expected to abide by them?  Will chimpanzees be expected to respect the rights of monkeys, and stop eating them?  When rights are granted to “other animals” will wolves be expected to stop killing and eating deer, which have as much right to life as they do?  Will the United Nations pass a motion censoring wolves for their disregard of the rights of deer?  This should raise some red flags in the minds of evolutionists that perhaps their logical train of thought is about to derail, but we shouldn’t hold out too much hope.  Morality is a human trait.  You can’t apply such a thing as the prohibition of torture to animals.  They don’t even understand the concept.  They are not sentient.  They are not morally responsible.  They are not made in the image of God.    —DK