Until the 17th century, many European countries routinely held animals legally responsible for serious acts of mischief. Pigs that chewed on babies’ ears and sheep that yielded to human sexual temptations, for example, were arrested, taken to court, put on trial and then hanged or burned. Such proceedings may have fallen out of fashion, but the legal status of animals remains a matter of lively debate – as shown by a flurry of recent news reports that Spain will shortly be extending legal rights to life, liberty and bodily integrity to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orang-utans.
Reactions have been mixed. Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton whose work with the Great Apes Project inspired the Spanish measure, saw it as the start of a trend. “I do think it is possible that we might want to extend this to . . . elephants and dolphins,” he told the BBC. “Maybe even . . . .dogs or pigs.” Others were less enthusiastic. Delia Padron, a representative for Amnesty International, expressed “surprise” that animals should be accorded “human rights” while they were still being denied to plenty of men and women. Fernando Sebastian, the archbishop of Pamplona, was more concerned by another of his constituencies: given that the rights of embryos remained unrecognised, he thought giving them to apes was “ridiculous.”
To a certain extent, such hostility is based on a simple misreading of the Spanish proposal. Although the Bill has been characterised by supporters and opponents alike as one that grants “human rights” to the great apes, chimpanzees remain as unlikely to sue for breach as they do to type the complete works of Shakespeare. The Bill simply requires the Spanish government “to take any necessary measures in international forums and organisations for the protection of great apes from maltreatment, slavery, torture, death, and extinction” – an obligation similar to hundreds of others imposed on governments everywhere, every day.
But opponents of the law are not simply misunderstanding what it says. Their scepticism rests on a deeper philosophical attitude towards rights – the belief that they should be recognised only where they are balanced by duties. Professor Steve Jones expressed the view pithily: “Rights come with responsibility,” he observed. “I’ve never seen a chimp being fined for stealing a plate of bananas.”
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Such notions are particularly commonplace among politicians, who have taken the idea one step further. Every Home Secretary in living memory has made a point of observing, repeatedly, that rights come with duties – and that as a result, people who have been irresponsible enjoy weaker and fewer rights. The present incumbent, John Reid, warned within days of taking over his job that the balance had gone badly awry. “There can be no rights without commensurate responsibilities,” he explained, “and we ought to be talking more about responsibility rather than concentrating on rights.”
The correlation sounds elegant and, like all elegant-sounding ideas, it is more plausible as a result. But it is also false. We recognise the rights of countless people who give nothing in return, from the underage and mentally retarded to the comatose. And to say that criminals enjoy fewer rights because they have failed in their responsibilities is as mystical as it is neat. It assumes a magically coherent universe where wrongs automatically balance rights – whereas cold logic dictates that there is only one legal duty imposed by a right: an obligation on someone else, usually the state, to respect it.
The beneficiaries of rights, whether they happen to be alleged paedophiles, illegal immigrants, or war criminals, are not privileged because they have shown themselves to be worthy. They possess rights because whatever we may think of the specific individual concerned, we collectively and traditionally believe that treating citizens with dignity is the civilised thing to do.
None of that helps in deciding whether or how laws can best protect the great apes; and it does not resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise between different people’s rights - between those of a soldier charged with war crimes, say, and his alleged victim. But next time you hear someone insisting that rights come with responsibilities, don’t be fooled. It might sound morally rigorous, but it makes as much sense as trying a pig.
Sadakat Kadri is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers and author of The Trial: A History, from Socrates to OJ Simpson which contains a chapter on animal trials.