We humans pour our empathy upon every creature we encounter until we decide we want to use them, or they’re a nuisance. Then empathy goes up in smoke.
You remember Darwin the Ikea Monkey. He was found
wandering in the parking lot beside an Ikea store in Toronto in the late fall
of 2012. He was wearing a very nice sheepskin coat and a diaper. He either
picked the lock on his owner's car, or she left the door open while she went
shopping, and out he went, causing consternation. He was captured and held by
animal control. The animal control officer, who'd never dealt with a monkey
before, got the owner to sign Darwin over to the authorities who sent him to
“sanctuary,” a place called Story Book Farm.
The officer may have said to Darwin’s owner that in the city of Toronto, you
can't own exotic animals, there might be a fine, though he didn’t know for sure.
There are certainly no provincial laws regulating who can hold or display exotic
animals. Pretty much anything goes in Ontario other than outright cruelty. Darwin’s
owner later sued Story Book Farm for Darwin's return. She told the court she had
been misinformed about fines, and she wanted Darwin back. There's an
interesting video on YouTube in which she gets into her car, surrounded by
journos with their cameras whirring, and holds up Darwin's Christmas clothes
for their inspection. An elf outfit. So cute. When asked, she says it's not
right for Darwin to be held in a sanctuary, because..." he's not a monkey,
he's my son."
In court, the
representative of the sanctuary explained that Darwin was doing well, that his
hair was growing back because he no longer wore clothes, and he was learning
how to be a monkey, not a son, again.
The court decided sanctuary is where Darwin belongs.
Free of human whimsy at last.
Darwin’s story seemed to have a story book ending.
But then, last month, the sanctuary, a volunteer run place about an hour's drive outside Toronto with a donate button
right up top on its home page, declared it was being evicted. Apparently, the
sanctuary needs a quarter of a million dollars by June 30 to buy another piece
of land, or its monkeys will have no place to go. Story Book Farm styles itself
as the only small primate sanctuary in Canada (there is another called Fauna
Sanctuary in Quebec but apes are kept there). Story Book’s CEO, formerly in law
enforcement, has been taking in stray primates from biomedical labs, or other
places of pain, for fifteen years. Among Story Book’s denizens is another
monkey called Pockets Warhol who makes paintings you can buy.
Of course Story Book launched a crowd-funding
campaign and spoke to the newspapers. Jane Goodall recorded a statement of
support. But after a few weeks, they got only about $800 in pledges. Darwin’s ascent to YouTube fame had been
followed by the usual fall to the bottom. Things were looking dire until a
supporter kicked in $100,000. Still more is needed to spare the 20 monkeys
living at Story Book from the big blue needle and Exeunt.
If you want to keep Darwin and friends alive, go to Story Book's website right now and donate. There you will find all sorts of
interesting facts about the laws and regulations on exotic (meaning non native)animal
ownership in Canada but most particularly on experiments on animals for science.
On the website there is a link to the Canadian Council on Animal
Care, a federal organization
that keeps statistics on how animals are "used" in science. The use
and reuse of that word in the document gets more and more chilling. (No lists
are compiled of studies done on plants or other life forms, though cognition
science has begun to show that every kind of living thing has the capacity to
sense, to feel, and therefore to decide, in short displays
intelligence.)Reports to the Council are
mandatory for any institution that gets grants from national science funding
agencies, but others (such as pharmaceutical companies) do not have to report.
That means the site's figures underestimate reality. So I was astonished to read
in the last report (dated 2011) that 3,333,689 animals were "used in science (research, teaching and
testing).”
The three most commonly used
sorts of animals were fish, mice and rats. Some 61% were allegedly used for
fundamental research. At least 4,355 animals studied were nonhuman primates-- apes
and monkeys, like Darwin the Ikea monkey, or the orangutans at the Toronto zoo, in
other words, animals whose intelligence and emotions are most like ours.
Do these experiments hurt? The experiments are
divided into categories according to invasiveness. The least invasive, category A, is
labeled “most invertebrates or live isolates,” as if invertebrates do not suffer pain from
invasive procedures. That would be news to an octopus. Octopus and squid may
have no backbones, but they are smart enough to recognize and remember you if
you get their attention, and to take evasive action if you’ve annoyed them. One leading researcher, Jennifer Mather of University of
Lethbridge, explained to me that if you perform surgery on an octopus, it will
almost immediately find a way to untie the sutures. She also says they have
distinct personalities. Category B includes experiments that cause little or no
discomfort or stress. Category C includes experiments that cause minor stress or
pain of short duration. Category D experiments cause “moderate to severe distress
or discomfort." Category E includes "procedures which cause severe
pain near, at, or above the pain tolerance threshold of unanesthetized
conscious animals."
No numbers are given for category A experiments. About
1,123,750 are listed as category B. There are almost as many listed in category
D --1,108,177. That’s right: one third of all the experiments done using animals
cause "moderate to severe distress or discomfort." As to category E, we can be grateful that
awful things were only done to 3.9% of the animals used, or 128,177.
PETA, the animal rights organization, quotes
government statistics which show that in the US
- 1.04 million animals are used in experiments (excluding rats, mice, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and agricultural animals used in agricultural experiments), plus an estimated 100 million mice and rats
and in the UK, there are
- 4.12 million experiments on animals
- 2.94 million done without anesthesia.
My new book SMARTS tells the story of the evolving meaning of intelligence—and
who or what displays it. The early natural philosophers assumed that only
people are really smart, and many later ones argued that intelligence is what defines
us as a species, sets us apart from all the rest. Though there have been bursts of interest in other forms of
intelligence since Darwin’s day, especially in the smart behavior of plants and pets, things learned have been forgotten again, only to be rediscovered decades
later. So the story of intelligence remained pretty much all about us until Jane
Goodall studied chimpanzees in the field. She reported that they do most of
the same things we do. They have cultures, they make tools in different ways,
they hunt, make war, commit murder, show love and experience fear, have societies. Frans B.M.
de Waal later demonstrated that they have politics too. In short, they are smart and
very much like us in the way they organize their lives.
Why does this matter? We have traditionally treated
all living beings other than ourselves as things that may be bought and sold.
In the past, we even treated some human beings—slaves-- as things until we outlawed slavery in 1948 by international agreement. (ISIS and Boko Haram are trying to bring it back.) Like everything else about human
societies, doctrines on the nature of things versus beings are in flux. People are treated as things, and things treated as people, depending.
In the last century we began to treat ideas—corporations-- as legal persons
with rights,including the right of free speech.
We have often used measurements of intelligence to
decide who is entitled to civil rights. We still take rights away from children
or the mentally disabled. In Ontario, for example, for more than a century we locked up children who
did very badly on IQ tests in so called hospital-schools where they were
neither schooled nor healed. Only recently did the
government close down these institutions, acknowledge the harms done in them,
and pay money to the victims.
I wrote two weeks ago about the use of the courts in
the US to try and extend the right of liberty to four chimpanzees held by
private owners and institutions in New York State. The Nonhuman Rights Project
launched applications for writs of habeas
corpus, one of which will be heard at the end of this month in a Manhattan
court room. The legal argument will be about the right to hold two chimps
subject to biomedical experiments at Stony Brook University. The application turns on affidavit evidence as to their capacities, their intelligence, their suffering. If this habeas corpus writ doesn’t
succeed, the Nonhuman Rights Project has a writ of another kind up its sleeve,
the writ de homine replegiando which
is even more deeply rooted in British common law than habeas corpus.
According to
lawyers Blake M. Mills and Steven M. Wise (both associated with the Nonhuman
Rights Project) in a paper just published
in the George Mason Law School
Journal, this writ may apply in Britain and all former British colonies,
including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, etc., unless
specifically expunged by statute. It was mainly used in the US by slaves
arguing that they were being improperly held. The virtue is its process: a
third party can make an application on behalf of an individual or thing, such
as a slave or even a ship, and the person doing the holding has to demonstrate that
they have the right to do so. While habeas corpus applications are heard by a judge, de homine replegiando applications
may be decided by a jury, and damages may be awarded. They can even be heard by a
court that may not have jurisdiction over the area where the person or thing is
being held, so long as the court has jurisdiction over the wrongdoer.
This writ will be tried on behalf of non humans, you may be sure, and sooner, rather than
later. And there is a good chance it will succeed.
If the courts do find that nonhuman apes have rights,
what about smart, autonomous machines? As one reader of this blog queried: what
happens if apes get rights and then one kills another? Would that result in a
charge of murder brought against the killer ape? And following this logic along, what happens when we create
intelligent autonomous robots to carry and use arms? If they are smart enough
to aim and fire without human intervention, and kill someone, can-—will-- a robot be tried
for murder? And what if a smart robot kills—or destroys-- another smart robot?
Or imprisons or decommissions it?
Stay tuned.
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