Big apes, but not small humans, come under protection of Spanish law

The Spanish government is planning a law to give the “hominid family of primates” – that is, to you and me, big apes – protection from experimentation and research if it causes them harm. The government says this is because of the apes’ genetic closeness to humans and that they have attributes that define personality.

Yes, they do. But before we are touched by the almost human gestures of, say, the silverback gorilla, or the pleasure grin of the orangutan, we should just add that one of the human attributes shared by big apes is that they will, if they have what the Spanish politicians call the right “personality,” kill you.

I mention that because we need to think about what this new law could mean. It is no good looking at it as some sort of Disney jungle wonder of the wild animals. The apes sometimes are vegetarian, and sometimes not. In the case of chimpanzees, they have canine teeth that could, and in some cases do, kill and eat monkeys — or rip off a human face.

Which kind of nastiness brings us back to the opening thought: big apes have a genetic closeness to humans and have attributes that define personality.

Follow through to what that means. If we accept that the “hominid family of primates” – so like us, and even more like our own extinct ancestors, australopithecus and the rest — demand protection because of their personalities and cognitive abilities, what protection do we owe on those same grounds to the other part of the higher primates? I mean the youngest of our own hominids, the early gestation human.

Let that question simmer for a moment, we will come back to it. First, here is more about what we are learning about the great apes, so like us in “personality.”

Just as the story from the Spanish government broke, a report in The Times said that on Sept 20 in Guinea in west Africa two male chimpanzees “tore an eight-month-old human baby from her mother’s back and disappeared into the forest to kill the child. Witnesses claimed the baby girl had been eviscerated by the chimp, perhaps using tools. The organs had been harvested for food, some reports said.”

There was more to the story than that, but just leave it there to show that big apes have nothing to do with environmentalist fairy stories. They may be smart hominids, but they are not nice people.

Spain says the law ought to respect them, murderous bent and all, and I am with that. Higher primates should be protected not because they are good or virtuous or wanted – because plenty of them are not — but because they are one of us; and each of us, you, me, and our cousins in the impenetrable forests of Uganda, has the right to be left alone to live.

The Spanish law will say no one can carry out experimentation or research on apes that causes them harm. The apes have cognitive ability. No one should use them for commercial purposes.

On it goes in the new law, and I am with it, even though in my life I want no ape of any kind. (When I worked at a newspaper in KwaZulu-Natal, I was worried about green mambas at the bus stop. I learned to curse any added problem with small primates.)

Once we start looking at bonobos, admiring these knuckle-walkers who can show altruism, you need to ask what we are supposed to make of the baby movements of hominids-in-utero, the way they practice breathing from halfway through term, the facial expressions – that is their distant relation to the pleasure smile of the orangutan – and the rapid eye movement of dreams, their cognitive ability learning familiar sounds.

So like us.  Therefore I say, protect them like apes.

Otherwise, if you are honest, you must ask why one hominid primate gets protection, while the other is okay down a hospital waste sluice because he is so like us – indeed, is us – but unwanted. And can I repeat that in my life all apes are unwanted. But no sluice.

My intellectual friends would say there is a difference between a primate swinging around a tree and a primate paddling in utero. Could be. We could try it out under the new Spanish law. There remains a discussion as to whether the youngest human who is waiting for months or days to pass through the three and a half inches of birth canal can feel pain. This is important, because clinics refuse to inject pain killers into the small hominid before death by abortion.

Try this: get a pregnant chimpanzee, put her under a light anaesthetic, then run some tests on her unborn chimp. No harm or damage to the mother, but put some wires in here, some electrical impulses there, turn it up. See what happens.

Except the Spanish law would not allow it. That small, hairy, hominid in the chimpanzee amniotic fluid could be harmed in the experiment and that would be illegal.

And dead right, too. No one should treat one of the hominid family of primates with the risk of such cruelty.

Except in the case of the young primates of homo sapiens. And yet they have genetic closeness to apes and attributes that define personality.