Exploitation of Great Apes Constitutes Genocide

Exploitation of Great Apes Constitutes Genocide

Steven M. Wise, Professor Animal Rights Law at the Harvard Law School, 2000, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals” Questia p. 7

I hope you will conclude, as I do in Chapter 11, that justice entitles chimpanzees and bonobos to legal personhood and to the fundamental legal rights of bodily integrity and bodily liberty--now. Kidnapping them, selling them, imprisoning them, and vivisecting them must stop--now. Their abuse and their murder must be forbidden for what they are: genocide.
THE MASS KILLING OF CHIMPANZEES AND BONOBOS IS GENOCIDE

Steven M. Wise, Professor Animal Rights Law at the Harvard Law School, 2000, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals” Questia p. 265 – 266

Chapter 1 concluded with the statement about chimpanzees and bonobos that "their abuse and their murders must be forbidden for what they are--genocide." This was not intended as metaphor. The word "genocide" emerged from the Holocaust. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it is as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or national group." ⁹⁴ Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary explains it as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group." The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide says it means

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures designed to prevent births within the group; or (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Genocide, in short, is the deliberate and systematic destruction, or attempted destruction, of any group that shares a nation, a politics, a culture, a race, a language, a religion, a tribe, or a history. Genocide is a crime whenever and by whomever committed. Genocide "shocks the conscience." ⁹⁷ Genocide need not spring from hatred. Had Westerners worked every African slave to death merely for profit, there would have been genocide. Nazis who murdered Jews to wash out racial impurities" committed genocide. American settlers who wiped coveted land clean of whole Indian tribes were genocidal.

The Latin roots of "genocide" are "genus" and "caedere." Caedere means "to kill." Genus generally means a class or kind that share common attributes. So genocide carries not just an explicit sense of destroying or trying to destroy a discrete group but also the implicit sense that the destroyed and the destroyer share membership in some larger group. Morris Goodman showed us that chimpanzees, humans, and bonobos are literally all members of the genus Homo, or should be. Chimpanzees and bonobos share not just our taxonomic trunk but our bough, our branch, our twig. If we don't all share a language, then we share "language" or something remarkably like it. If we don't all share a common culture, we share "culture." ⁹⁸ If human politics and chimpanzee politics are not the same thing, both are still "politics." ⁹⁹ Perhaps in the end, we simply need to convince Judge Juno that we may not be an autistic species, just a narcissistic one, transfixed by our own reflection and that she needs to put aside childish things and allow her mature reason, her passion for liberty and equality, and her sense of fair play to open her eyes so that when she gazes into the mirror of justice, she sees Jerom.

Confinement for Great Apes Harmful

Mark Rowlands, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, 2002, Animals Like Us, p. 153

All of this is obvious. Almost as obvious is the idea that a deprivation of an animal’s autonomy is a thwarting of one of its most vital interests. Being able to do what you want, at least some of the time, is ultimately what makes life worth living. Therefore, a serious deprivation of autonomy strikes at the core of what makes a life worthwhile. So, one of the things you will know in the partial position is that confinement in a zoo is, almost certainly, thwarting of one of the most vital interest of an animal.

David Nibert, Professor of sociology, Wittenburg University, 2002, Animal Rights/Human Rights: entanglement of oppression and liberation, p. 199

Thus as other animals became more deeply integrated into the day-to-day organization of agricultural society, their “inferior” status, relative to human animals—especially those human animals perceived as intrinsically important and valuable—came to be viewed as natural. The powerful and compelling forces that diminished human recognition of the significance and individuality of other animals also subverted recognition of and sensitivity to the individuality and suffering of devalued humans who were cast into such positions as slave, peasant, and harem possession.

Anthony Jon Waters, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law. Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal, (PROPERTY TO PERSON: THE CASE OF EVELYN HART) 2000, p. 5-6

Toshisada Nishida, a Professor of Zoology, has compared the other hominids, with their complex cultures and cognitive abilities, to members of hunter-   gatherer societies. Were our government to import humans from such a society in order to subject them to lifelong confinement and use them in painful research for the benefit of U.S. citizens, the idea would be universally denounced as unconscionable, and our Constitution would be invoked to confirm what our moral senses tell us. In light of our knowledge about other great apes, their importation and enslavement ought to provoke the same responses.