The inalienable rights of Apes? They share up to 98.7 percent of our DNA; in Spain, they may soon share our rights.

• Author: McNeil, Jr., Donald G.
• Position: ETHICS

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The environment committee of the Spanish Parliament voted in June to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.

The proposed law would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, an international organization of scientists, ethicists, psychologists, and animal-rights advocates based in Seattle. The Project, founded in 1993, points to apes' human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past, and plan for the future.

The Great Ape Project's directors, Peter Singer, an ethicist based at Princeton University, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a "community of equals" with humans.

If the bill passes, it will be illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment--as in being made to perform in circuses or films--will be forbidden. The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated.

What's intriguing about the committee's action is that it raises the question not only of what kinship humans have with certain animals, but also of what rights all humans should have.

WHICH RIGHTS? WHICH ANIMALS?

We like to think that there is a distinct line between humans and animals, and that certain human rights are inalienable.

But Singer has grappled with both those questions as part of the Great Ape Project: He left out lesser apes like gibbons because scientific evidence of human qualities is weaker, and he demanded only rights that he believed all humans were usually offered, such as freedom from torture--rather than, say, a right to education or medical care.

Depending on how it is counted, the DNA of the great apes is 95 percent to 98.7 percent the same as that of humans.

Nonetheless, the law treats all animals as lower orders. Human Rights Watch, a humanitarian group based in New York, has no position on apes in Spain and has never had an internal debate about who is human, says Joseph Saunders, deputy program director.

"There's no blurry middle," he says, "and human rights are so woefully protected that we're going to keep our focus there."

At the same time, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many humans: women, children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote, and courts can order surgery or...