Chimps get a retirement home and support for rights

Boston Globe ^ | David Arnold

[wallcrawlr]

CAMBRIDGE - They feel love and loss. They can paint, communicate in sign language, and fight. And they share 98.7 percent of human DNA.

Yet chimpanzees have fewer rights than a brain-dead human. Thousands of them are used in medical research, kept in zoos, or work in circuses, with no law protecting them from being euthanized when their work life is over.

But in a sign of how attitudes toward nonhuman primates are changing, the federal government announced plans yesterday for an unprecedented retirement home for 800 chimps formerly used in research. On the same day, eminent researchers and lawyers held a first-ever meeting at Harvard Law School on how to give chimps more legal rights, including status that might get them out of the labs and animal acts altogether.

''Legal rights grow out of wrongs,'' Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard, told several hundred people in Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall yesteday. ''And there is no question that this animal has suffered pervasive wrongs over many centuries.''

[VOA]

Chimps get a retirement home and support for rights

They give chimpanzees a retirement home,
and tell us that Grandpa should consider staying on the front porch next winter
in order to not squander resources. [RE: Old quote from former Colorado governor Lamb (D).]

Yep, that's what liberals think.

[trebb]

"Yet chimpanzees have fewer rights than a brain-dead human."

But, way more rights than a healthy human fetus...

[DWSUWF]

This is how all the trouble in 'Planet of the Apes' got started...

[j271]

how to give chimps more legal rights

How bizarre has America become when its elites are working to reduce human legal rights -- most notably those involving property -- while increasing chimpanzee legal rights?

[San Jacinto]

Yet chimpanzees have fewer rights than a brain-dead human

I want this corrected!!!
A chimp should have more rights than Al Gore!!!!

[wallcrawlr]

Your right, it should read "...more rights than a tree stump."

[Sabertooth]

As the transhumanists and animal rights zealots drag our civilization down the road to bestiality, we will inevitably see primate pen-pal programs for lonely hearts on the outside, much as we now do with death row prisoners.

Why should marriage be limited to humans, anyway?

[madvlad]

Yes, they are jackasses!

The next thing you know is that chimps will
have more rights than humans! Sort of in the
same vein as murderers have more rights than
their victims!!

Mad Vlad

[San Jacinto]

....the federal government announced plans yesterday for an unprecedented retirement home for 800 chimps formerly used in research.

Now that's the ticket. A little shuffle board, poolside banana daquiri's, bingo on Tuesdays, the early bird special at Denny's --- the chimps have earned it. I just hope the Republicans don't try to take away their free prescription drugs and monkeycare benefits.

[johnny7]

“Junior, get my shot-gun... seems we got got some people who can't use their thumbs.

[Mr. Bird]

This is how all the trouble in 'Planet of the Apes' got started

Damn them all to hell!

[VOA]

...eminent researchers and lawyers held a first-ever meeting at Harvard Law School
on how to give chimps more legal rights, including status that might get them out
of the labs and animal acts altogether.

Take you hands off my tax dollars and our human jurisprudence system,
you d@mn dirty apes! And "eminent researchers and lawyers"!!!

...end of rant and Charleston Heston voice-emulation mode

[DWSUWF]

"...Damn them all to hell!..."

To which I'd add, "Damn dirty apes!"

Trivia question...

In the parting scene on the beach, Kim Hunter's character, Dr. Zira, kissed Heston's character, Taylor, after a remark about him being "...so damn ugly..."

What happened after the kiss that ended up on the cutting room floor?

Dr. Zira wiping her muzzle with her sleeve and remarking, "That's a little more tongue than I'm used to Bright Eyes."

[DWSUWF]

"...seems we got got some people who can't use their thumbs..."

Your blatant 'opposible-digit-ism' sickens me...

[Kenton]

Yet chimpanzees have fewer rights than a brain-dead human. Thousands of them are used in medical research, kept in zoos, or work in circuses, with no law protecting them from being euthanized when their work life is over.

I see your point, and I agree. I would propose we correct this injustice by building housing for the chimps, and using brain-dead humans for medical research, zoos, or working in circuses.

Barbra Streisand and AlGore come immediately to mind...

[hoosierskypilot]

Yea, and the next thing on the ticket will be the right to vote. And then, driver's licenses. And then.......

[sheik yerbouty]

I agree. I've in my travels had a chance to directly work with a 3 year old chimpanzee. It was more intelligent, and better behaved than Al Gore and his retinue of folls.