The Spanish parliament has approved a resolution that could bestow legal rights upon apes.

It’s ironic, but a country perhaps best known for bullfighting is taking the lead on “animal rights,” as Spain has approved a resolution that could ultimately grant apes legal rights. Reports timesonline.co.uk:

In what is thought to be the first time a national legislature has granted such rights to animals, the Spanish parliament’s environmental committee voted to approve resolutions committing the country to the Great Apes Project, designed by scientists and philosophers who say that humans’ closest biological relatives also deserve rights.

If such sentiments sound radical to you, know that they constitute moderation in the animal-rights community. Why, I remember hearing a P.E.T.A (no, that’s not People for the Eating of Tasty Animals) representative opine years ago that a rat had as much right to live as a newborn infant. I exaggerate not.

One can only imagine the perils of Spain’s proposed policy. It could spur a deluge of illegal migration, with orangutans, chimpanzees and other simians leaving their indigenous home and crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to seek Iberian refuge. After all, as Dian Fossey and “Gorillas in the Mist” demonstrated, they are being persecuted by their chauvinistic human overlords in Africa. 

Although I jest, assigning human rights to animals is no laughing matter. Those who do so sometimes mean well, but they fail to understand the consequences of drawing new equivalencies between animals and humans. For such a practice doesn’t elevate beasts as much as it lowers man.

This is even evident in the language used by those who draw such equivalencies. When contrasting animals and humans, they will often say something to the effect of, “Well, people are just animals anyway.” Saying “just” anything is a reductive statement, as in, “It’s just a material thing” or “It’s just a job.” You are saying, “Don’t take matters so seriously; this is all the thing is.” 

Notice that the apologists for inter-species equality doctrine never propose that we should view animals as we would humans, only the reverse. They never state that animals are spiritual beings, children of God with souls, and we should thus hold them sacred. This would be closer to the Hindu ideal, which would be less dangerous and make more sense. Instead, they say we should break the bounds of homo-centrism by viewing people as animals.

The apologists would no doubt counter that they are merely being precise, that “animals” is the broad category into which the human species belongs. “Besides,” say they, “we don’t believe in God and souls and other such fairy-tale folderol, these things you claim bestow unique status upon man. We’re being scientific, you rube!”  Perhaps they are scientific, but like the philosopher designers of the Great Apes Project, at best they are merely aping philosophy.

You cannot engender respect for living things, animal or human, if you detach people from God. The unrivalled respect for human life that arose in the West was based on the idea that man is not just flesh but spirit and that God enjoins us to hold such a spiritual being sacrosanct. Some eschew such religious talk, but the imperative of being logical and precise dictates that we indulge it. For if we have no souls, what are we? Nothing but a few pounds of chemicals and water – organic robots, if you will. If there’s nothing above us to use as an absolute yardstick of right and wrong (Truth), then all our ideas about morality – or, to use moral relativists’ term of choice, values – are just opinion. This is synonymous with saying there is no right or wrong.

It then follows that there couldn’t be something wrong with killing anything or anything right about valuing something, including life. This should be obvious, and the reality that a soulless creature would just be chemicals and water brings it into focus. What could be wrong with terminating the function of an organic robot?

One may now mention that, absent souls, animals are nothing but organic robots, so why treat them with any measure of dignity? The answer is simply because they are part of God’s creation, all of which should be accorded respect. This is not, however, synonymous with saying animals have rights. As someone once put it, we should treat them well not because they have rights but because we have responsibilities.

One of those responsibilities is to uphold the sanctity of human life and ensure that our children follow suit. This cannot be accomplished by convincing people “we’re just animals.” We eat animals, sometimes use them to test and create products and exterminate them when their presence threatens our well-being (e.g., roaches and vermin). Animal-rights activists may say the solution is to eliminate those practices, but that is unrealistic because it’s unreasonable.     

What is quite realistic is that it’s entirely possible to create a civilization so relativistic, so immoral that it has respect for nothing and nobody. This is why the inter-species equality doctrine is actually self-defeating. Animals don’t believe in God. Animals don’t know right from wrong but act on instinct. Animals have no respect for other animal life. And if atheistic animal-rights activists are correct and there is no God, no Truth, there is no reason to have it. They should remember that when society teaches children we are only animals, that is exactly how they will behave.

Not all animal-rights activists would draw an equivalency between a rat and a baby, but they are all confused. Like everyone else, they draw lines; since they eat vegetables, they must consider plant life fair game (which is why, I suppose, they’re not plant-rights activists) and some accept the elimination of insect infestations. The key is drawing that line in the right place, and that is between the spirit and flesh, man and beast.