Beware the inhumanity of animal charities

He had the idea of encouraging this, coaxing the monkeys into pressing the shutter while they were looking at the lens. He has said: “It wasn’t serendipitous monkey behaviour. It required a lot of knowledge on my behalf, a lot of perseverance.” The best “selfie” was published. One photography website giggled: “Interesting question: doesn’t the monkey technically own the rights to the images?” But that joke soured.

When in 2014 the blog Techdirt and Wikipedia used it without permission, Mr Slater sent “takedown” requests. The websites refused, Wikipedia straight-facedly claiming that the image couldn’t be copyright because the monkey created it. The US Copyright Office did rule that animals can’t own copyrights. But then Peta — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — weighed in with lawyers and has spent almost two years fighting Mr Slater on behalf of the macaque, which it says is called Naruto and is the rightful owner of the picture.

Actually Mr Slater protests that it’s a different animal — wrong age and sex — but that doesn’t stop the lawyers getting richer by the day. Last year a judge ruled against Peta but it appealed and was heard in a federal court last Wednesday.

Learned counsel are having a ball thinking up questions. Does the charity have a close enough relationship to the monkey to represent it in court? Even Darwin might feel doubts about their personal cousinship. Is the monkey harmed, your honour, by the law’s failure to recognise its entitlement, since he or she has no way to hold money? Does a monkey have a professional reputation to protect? And, asked Judge Carlos Bea, can a monkey rightfully bequeath copyright? “In the world of Naruto, is there legitimacy and illegitimacy?” he wondered. “Are Naruto’s offspring ‘children’, as defined by the statute?”

For Mr Slater — who has his own human child aged seven to think of, and a near-ruined career — it is not funny. He has paid a US attorney, and lost massive potential earnings on the picture. He says he couldn’t afford the air fare to San Francisco last week to hear the case, can’t pay his tax or replace equipment, worries for his family and is looking for casual work “including dog-walking”.

The irony is that wildlife photographers, whether for film or still shots, are not usually opportunists but passionate about conserving the natural glories they record. Without their mosquito-bitten, sweaty, muddy patience and technical expertise, wildlife charities would never get the support they do. One of Mr Slater’s reasons for the Indonesian trip is that crested black macaques are endangered and his pictures might “create enough ecotourism to make the locals realise that there’s a good reason to keep these monkeys alive”.

But Peta uses donors’ money to go through court after court, crushing Mr Slater because the organisation reckons that for it alone to win control of the royalties would benefit the monkey’s kin and habitat. “Peta is proud to be his voice in court,” the charity said. Don’t worry about the gender — still nobody is sure who the simian selfie-taker was anyway.

I am no lawyer or ethicist, but have a look at Peta: a vegan charity condemning “speciesism” and promoting full animal rights rather than welfare. Some of its campaigns are such as any decent person should endorse. Others are not, and even in reasonable cases it has no hesitation in going that bit too far. It states: “When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness and fear, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” After the 2015 shooting of Cecil the lion, its president, Ingrid Newkirk, said that if the killer had cynically lured the animal out of its park, he should be “extradited, charged and, preferably, hanged”. Peta itself has been accused of putting down too many healthy animals in its care. A spokeswoman reportedly declared: “Euthanasia is a product of love for animals who have no one to love them.”

Thus two things emerge most clearly from the dozens of reports I read about Peta. One is that it is very rich and uses publicity to get richer still. The other is that it appears sure that it is always right and anyone who disagrees is bad. In this, one finds gloomy parallels with the recent history of our own RSPCA: a charity I once keenly supported but abandoned after a string of bullying cases and its vainglorious decision to waste money on flying a blimp above the 2002 Countryside March. Even in an age of hysterical overstatement, self-righteous rage and curdled indignation there seems to be something unusually toxic about animal causes. Not to mention a bitter willingness to crush fellow humans. I’d call it brutal, except that brutes are less spiteful.