Should the Great Apes have Human Rights?

Is it true that humans have a divine right to rule over all animals and animals have only rights we give them, if any?

We are taught in school that selfish and corrupt dictators, and fascist regimes typically abuse human rights. Sometimes hawkish leaders come up with innovative methods of classification to marginalise some people on us versus them axes so that ‘they’ can be ‘contained’ for the protection of ‘us’. 

Currently we have at least two ongoing wars where the purported aim is to improve the human right situation of these countries where the wars are being fought. What is perceived as cultural legacy in one country is considered human rights abuse in another. Yet, we have a universal concept for human rights.

What is the Concept of Human Right

To give a clear idea of what “Human Rights” means, the United Nation declares that all human beings are born free and are equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. The United Nations universal declaration of human rights can be found in 360 languages.

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As the first country in the “Modern world”, Spain has extended this protection to the Great Apes by passing a law about rights and fair treatment of animals. 

The Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and Orangutans, called the Great Apes are our cousins on the biological tree. Along with humans, they belong to the subfamily Homininae of the biological family Hominidae.  

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• The Great Apes share about 96% of their DNA with humans.  
• Mice share about 90% while plants have more DNA than humans. 
• Scientists estimate that humans and chimpanzees probably split less than 5.4 million years ago.

Animal Rights in the Modern World

The Spanish parliament has approved resolutions, which argues that "non-human hominids" should enjoy the right to life, freedom, and not to be tortured. 

The philosophers Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, who started the Great Apes project argue that the apes are the closest genetic relative to humans and display emotions such as love, fear, anxiety and jealousy – and should be protected by similar laws as humans. Arguing that this law would be going against divine will, which puts man above animals, the Catholic bishops are dead against giving legal protection to animals.

Using apes in circuses, television commercials, or filming will also be banned and while housing apes in Spanish zoos, of which there are currently 315, will remain legal, their living conditions need to improve substantially.

• In 1999, New Zealand's parliament gave the great apes legal protection from animal experimentation. Britain now forbid experiments on chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. 
• The German parliament voted in 2002 to add the phrase “and animals” to a clause in the country’s constitution requiring the state to uphold the dignity of humans. 
• In 1992, Switzerland amended its constitution to recognise animals as “beings,” and not “things.”

Animal Rights in the Ancient World

In the ancient world, respect for animals wasn’t totally unknown. In cave paintings of Lascaux or Altamira, 15,000-30,000 years ago the artists rarely portrayed the animals as being hunted or eaten. They were rather mythical figures of worship.

In his (The Fourteen Rock Edicts, 1) Emperor Ashoka of India decrees "No living beings are to be slaughtered or offered in sacrifice". 

About ancient Egypt, Herodotus (484-425 BC) tells us that “

The Egyptian Priests do to kill anything that has life, except such things as they offer in sacrifice, and animals are accounted sacred. Should any one kill any of these beasts, if wilfully, death is the punishment”.

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In ancient Greece, Pythagoras (580-500 BCE) urged respect for animals. He believed that humans have the same kind of souls as animals, in fact, it is the same one spirit that pervades the universe. The souls transmigrated from humans to animals. Pythagoras bought animals from the market to set them free in nature, where they belonged according to him.

In any culture, the mentally ill or retarded can be stripped of their human rights to free movement by being strapped to their beds. 

• Western democracies with women presidents or prime ministers snugly accept that they can’t have women priests, as they are considered inferior to men. 
• 4 million Americans, over 80% of them black, have been permanently disenfranchised because of even petty crimes. 

Has anyone ever heard of monkeys being jailed for stealing bananas or seagulls detained as “unlawful enemy combatants” and given shock treatments for terrorising people in market squares?

Now, as the seventh Great Ape, humans are consistently driving the other six to extinction, extending ‘human’ rights to animals is a great moral step for the human animal.

Who Will Soon Go Hungry? Reasons for the food shortage in the world.

Increasing food prices have recently been blamed on food shortages though there are no major crop failures, famines, pestilence or other tangible epidemic involving large areas in the world today, where food production drops drastically. 

Is this food crisis going to affect the rich nations or will it drive the starving poor into even more abject despair?

There are winners and losers in this crisis. The Farm Belt has become one of the most prosperous regions of the United States due to skyrocketing food prices, while many regions in the world have slid from poverty into hunger. 

The Food and Agriculture Organization, a branch of the United Nations, has identified 36 "crisis" countries, 21 of which are in Africa. 

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Paul Krugman in his article gives four main reasons for the present food crisis:

1. The explosive growth of high-calorie food habits in emerging economies like China. 700 calories of animal feed is needed to produce a 100-calorie chunk of beef.
2. Rise in oil prices. Modern food production is highly energy intensive, so high fuel costs drive food prices up. The invasion of Iraq, rather than lower oil prices, raised them.
3. Climate change resulting in drought and crop decreases in key wheat growing areas like Australia.
4. Complacence in the food market: precautionary inventories have shrunk on the belief that more can always be imported.

Most of the Starving People Live in Developing Countries

An estimated 820 million of the 850 million people in the world today suffering from hunger, live in developing countries. 

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These are the countries most affected by climate change. Food prices have risen 83% in the last three years, according to the World Bank, pushing 100 million more people into hunger.

Have governments and international organisations taken the spectre of doom seriously? The UN summit on global food crisis called by secretary general Ban Ki Moon declared that world food production must rise by 50% by 2030, trade barriers should be lowered and export bans removed to stop the spread of hunger.

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Rich countries spend billions of dollars on farm subsidies and wasteful food consumption. 

"The excess consumption by the world's obese costs $20bn annually, to which must be added indirect costs of $100bn resulting from premature death and related diseases," 

according to the director-general of the UN's Food And Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf. He adds that the unprecedented hike in food prices, which rose 52 percent between 2007 and 2008 led to explosion of agricultural imports in the last 30 years. 

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Africa has become a net importer of agricultural commodities.

• 87 percent of which were food products in 2005. 
• Only 14 percent of Africa’s 184 million hectares of arable land is under cultivation and most of the rest in a state of accelerated degradation.

Many food-exporting countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have tried limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers. Not only has this led to angry protests from farmers because of losses in income, but it has also made things even worse in countries that need to import food. 

Different Approaches to Food Shortage Problems

There are other voices totally disagreeing with these approaches. Gonzalo Oviedo, the senior advisor on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature blames human neglect of nature. The modern business-dominated agricultural industry, he argues, promotes the degradation of nature leading to less and worse food. 

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The existing food production systems, which is based on high inputs like fertilisers and is only accessible through market mechanisms, should be changed to systems based on locally available and more environmentally friendly inputs reducing high payouts to middlemen and big agribusinesses.

Further, according to Gonzalo Oviedo, the main culprit is the prevailing model of concentration of land in small groups of big landowners who are dropping food production for local markets and moving to big industrial production of commodities that produce no local benefits and deprive small farmers and landless peasants of access to productive assets like land, water sources and fisheries.