Tuesday, April 21, 2015

A chimp is not a monkey, you ape

“Cool, Monkeys Are People Now Too,” laments a headline. Unfortunately, the story has nothing to do with monkeys. But hey, it’s black, furry, probably eats lots of bananas, and exists primarily to keep us entertained. Cartoons have already equipped us with all the information we need to make complex ethical decisions about the animal's treatment.

The news in question actually relates to a group of chimpanzees who, for the first time in US history, have been granted a day in court under a writ of habeus corpus — a right granted to humans to challenge unlawful detention.

But chimps are apes, not monkeys; the closest living relatives we have. Conflating the two in a discussion of law and scientific research is to ignore evolution. The...

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