[ QUOTE ]
Chimps are people too, insists scientist
From the article:
AN EXPERT on primates is to tell a court that apes are people, in a groundbreaking case that will determine whether a chimp can have human rights.
Jane Goodall, known worldwide for her study of chimpanzee social and family life, has agreed to testify that apes deserve the same treatment as humans
and
This is the second legal action in Europe to address whether primates should be guaranteed human rights; the Socialist government in Spain has proposed a law to allow moral guardianship of great apes, akin to the care for severely disabled or comatose people.
Your tax dollars going for the welfare of chimpanzees. I guess the eventual goal is to get them to vote. How crazy is this???
[/ QUOTE ]
How about we humans just leave chimps in the wild and unmolested, where they can take care of themselves? Chimps can be the guardians of chimps just as they have for hundreds of thousands of years. All humans need do is leave them alone and stop destroying their natural habitat.
I'd rather see tax dollars go for the preservation of wild areas than for the custodial care of chimpanzees. I'll go out on a limb here and guess that if chimps could choose, that's probably what they'd prefer too [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
Couldn't these chimpanzees captured from the wild be released back into the wilds? I can see the other point if a chimp was raised from babyhood in a human environment, but it seems to me that would be on a case-by-case basis and not contingent upon a court ruling for all chimps but rather upon the well-caring of a private party. A fair idea might be to have the poachers trade places with the captured chimps: the chimps get to go back to the wilds and the poachers get to go to the laboratory.