Animal rights activist Sarah Whitman wrote an op-ed for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer arguing that the 2000 Census missed a significant undercounted class of persons — apes. Whitman is the campaign director for the Great Ape Project’s Census 2001 campaign which aims to count, as she puts it, the “many complex individuals still to be counted, including some 2,000 to 3,000 nonhuman great apes.”
Whitman writes,
Nonhuman great apes — orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas — share the qualities that define “people,” including intelligence, sensitivity, complex social systems and the ability to suffer. Because of these qualities, nonhuman great apes should be formally recognized, protected and respected.
By “formally recognized” Whitman means that chimpanzees should be considered persons with inviolable rights. In New Zealand, The Great Ape Project got surprisingly far in its campaign to have that country’s constitution amended to recognize non-human primates as persons. Whitman and other activists leave out plenty of evidence that non-human primates are very different cognitively from human beings; the activists typically use controversial data gleaned from non-human primates under less-than-rigorous scientific conditions (for example, activists claim that it is a fact that great apes are self-aware, when the evidence for this claim is paltry at best and based largely on unrepeatable experiments with apes who lived most of their lives with human beings).
The goal of the Census 2001, Whitman writes,
…is much more than a headcount. It stands as a challenge to currently accepted practiced and situations imposed upon our fellow great apes.
…Despite their complexities, the law treats nonhuman great apes as things — pieces of property. Sentience, family bonds and community-based lifestyles are ignored as they are subjected to pain, isolation and fear. Even in instances where protective laws apply, the laws can be totally ineffective.
To be sure, the way great apes are treated is often appalling and some institutions do not do enough to comply with the law regarding care and treatment of such animals. But the system as improved dramatically since the 1980s and is on the right track. Meanwhile, although they play a much diminished role in medical research thanks to advances and refinements in techniques, non-human primates are still extremely important in some avenues of medical research such as AIDS/HIV.
Source:
Census isn’t complete until great apes are counted. Sarah Whitman, Seattle Post-Intellignecer, November 5, 2000.