the thing is, there are more important things to get under control first before worry about luxury goals.
If your house is falling apart because of termites, you dont go worrying about getting new blinds for the windows. Priorities seem to be a bit mixed up with the better off folks i see.

I dont remember seeing anything about wanting to grant rights to Tuna's or any of the other non communicative animals.

We are specifically talking about Chimpanzees abut I am willing to extend the argument to Gorilla's.

The fact that we can teach a chimp or gorilla sign language and communicate with it means they are sentient and can communicate and carry on a conversation within their small vocabulary. We are not talking dogs, cats, fish, birds, or other animals that we can not carry on a conversation with.

I should say, that I don't believe Chimps deserve all the rights that humans do. I mean, I'm not a biologist, and I don't know as much as they do about the whole situation. But they certainly deserve rights. They are brilliant creatures. I actually don't see any problem with giving them the three inalienable rights that our Declaration of Independence was supposed to secure for us: the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". They needn't vote, they needn't run for office, or whatever silly things were allegedly suggested. But they do deserve serious consideration.

Ok, there are animals and then there are humans. There is a dividing line between the two and there is no way to make an animal equal to a human. Chimps are inteligent, but they still are not individualized like humans are. Chimps may be able to think for themselves, but they can't think at the same level humans... hm... this is hard to put. Chimps act on instinct over thought, unlike humans. Therefore this makes them animals and I don't think that an ape that will live for less than two decades really could make use of any rights anyway.

I have to agree with Roaming East. It is kind of ridiculous to have this proposed. I do believe that they shouldn't be treated cruelly and what not. That's just evil. But you gotta draw the line eventually, dudes. A non-human, specifically an animal, shouldn't be able to have those rights. It's not like it needs them, since it generally gets to sit around in a cage all day. Next thing you know, they're gonna be trying to nominate Ham for the Presidency.

lol... nicely put. I was trying to say something like that. But if a pickle ran for presidant, I would vote for it!

You know something, 90% of what you do, of what you think is instinct. Well hidden instinct, but instinct nonetheless.
And again I say.
the line is not homo sapiens/all but sentient/non sentient.
I'm not saying just like loco, that primates should have to abide by our laws, be able to run for offices, have to register etc etc etc, but they should indeed be granted some basic humane rights.
See that I did not use human but humane.
For instance, I myself believe, that the willing killing of a chimp by human be classified as normal murder in a sense, for a chim has a very similliar potential of development as a human.


And ever read anything from the uplift war universe ?:)

We should give them equal rights for one day, they will rule the post atomic world of the future where man is the animal and Ape is the master.(clicky)

~Added so this won't get deleted~

Limited rights that protect them from cruelty: yes, therefore I believe they should have certain human rights.

Concerning civil rights, a line has to be drawn somewhere. Personally, I believe that it best exists at a clear scientific divide between the human and the inhuman. Ethically, one might seek to establish concerns for the more intelligent of animals, but regardless, granting governmental liberties to beings that are not of our species is more problematic than it's worth. If you grant one species special consideration, why not another - the next is only slightly less intelligent, after all. Continue this process ad infinitum, and guess what - nothing is left. Distinctions have to be made, or else one falls down an ideological slope.

I agree. The point you bring up is a good one. And I think this issue must be addressed by sophisticated means of inter-species communication. When we understand that certain creatures besides ourselves can have semblances of self-awareness and consciousness, we need to do away with killing them wantonly and thoughtlessly like we do now. We'll never know what's "going on inside the heads" of animals. But we can know that something is going on.

The line can be drawn I think where communication becomes futile. It's not a matter of a simple "level of intelligence", we can't have a scale from 1 to 100, and draw the line somewhere around 75. It doesn't work like that. The line will be drawn when science is advanced enough to allow us to communicate more precisely with the more intelligent species that are out there.
While it's probably true that Chimps have the capacity to reason that we do, as wraith cat said is true. We act on instinct no less than any other animal does. We are animals, after all. We evolved just like they did, and we are no less effected behaviorally speaking by our genes than they are. We can simply override instinct with reason. And maybe there are some other creatures than can to.

It's not reason that leads to sexual intercourse, it's instinct. Or to eating. Or to sleeping. The great majority of our daily lives, and the big turns that we take in our lives, are caused by instinct, not pure reason. Obviously, because our faculty for reasoning is so great, we can do brilliant things, like, for instance, write and read.