Great Ape “Rights”

According to Philosophy Now News, the Great Ape Project, founded and led by the greatest Ape of all–Peter Singer, is pressurizing the Spanish Parliament to introduce “rights” to all Apes, Orangutans, Chimpanzees, Gorilla’s, Monkey’s–and whatever else you wish to include–in an effort to create a “community of equals.” Apparently, this community of “humans, chimpanzees and orangutans would all enjoy three fundamental rights, these being: right to life; right to freedom, and protection from torture.”

The bill is likely to be introduced in Spain after the parliamentary recess this summer. Of course, environmentalists are all cheering for this bill.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Roman Catholic Church denounces the proposed law on the rationale that “we don’t give rights to some people…such as unborn children.” Therefore, if fetuses and clumps of human cells were to be granted human rights, then presumably, the Church would be fine with extending those “rights” to Orangutans and what have you.

I doubt that these people really even know what they’re talking about. There is so much that is wrong with this whole “animals rights” fiasco. If they were to be asked, “what exactly are rights?” they would be quick to say rights are “the right to life, to liberty, to property, etc.”

But that’s merely ennumerating the various rights we have; if they knew what “rights” essentially are, they would also realize that “rights” are such that cannot be granted or given to those that do not possess it in the first place!

So, say we grant these animals the right to “protection from torture.” Are we now going to arrest all other animals who break this law by inflicting “torture” on these protected group of animals whom we have just granted these rights? Or does this law only apply to humans, to restrict human activity so that animals can “enjoy” greater freedom and “rights”?

In one of my earlier posts on Animal Rights, I had pointed out that those who argue for the rights of animals in fact harbor a hatred for the rights of men. In all such cases, animals and clumps of cells are not gaining any rights, but humans are certainly losing their existing rights:

[A] culture that insists on applying the concept of rights to animals, a culture led by intellectually dishonest men like Peter Singer, are infact looking to rob those rights from humans. By declaring the rights of a volitional, conceptual being as invalid and less important than the so-called rights of a beast, they nullify the very basic values life and freedom and happiness that the fundamental rights are supposed to guarantee.
This does not reveal their love for animals but their disgusting hatred for humanity.

Objectivism correctly recognizes that there is only one fundamental right: the right to one’s life. All else are necessary derivatives or corollaries. Reality does not permit you to fabricate any new “right to protection from torture” or the “right to a living wage” or the “right to employment and healthcare.”

Rand defines the concept of rights as such:

Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.

Men like Peter Singer are thoroughly evil not because they care about the lives of animals, but because they have disdain for human rights and human happiness; they are in the business of advocating ideas and a worldview, but have completely abdicated the responsibility to ensure that the ideas they promote–and the consequent actions that are generated–are consistent and compatible with man’s nature and requirements for living.