Chimps are not people but they deserve our respect and care

In the last moments of her life, Pansy was lovingly tended by friends and relatives. They caressed her, clasped her hand, made her comfortable - and kept a bedside vigil even after the elderly matriarch's final breath.

This scene of tenderness played out in a chimpanzee enclosure in a safari park; in 2010, scientists duly added the act of grieving to the tally of similarities between humans and our closest ape relatives. That list forms the basis of a landmark legal case heard last week that seeks to assign human rights to non-human animals. It is a valiant action that, even if ultimately doomed, should prompt us to rethink our relationship with - and our obligations towards - other species.

The Nonhuman Rights Project, an American advocacy group whose board includes the primatologist Jane Goodall, is hoping to smash the species barrier by persuading a New York Court to regard chimpanzees not as property but as "persons". That would entitle the animals to some of the protections humans enjoy, such as a degree of liberty and freedom from harm.

Success would mean animals currently kept as pets or in research laboratories would be released to Chimp Haven, a 200-acre "retirement" forest in Louisiana. The NhRP has compared its campaign to the anti-slavery movement; it rails against what the philosopher Peter Singer has labelled "speciesism", or human exceptionalism.

The advocacy group's first case, an attempt last year to free a pet chimp called Tommy, failed. The animal could not enjoy rights, the court heard, because it was incapable of bearing any sense of responsibility towards society. Tommy, 26, remains in a cage with a television for company.

But the group's efforts at freeing Leo and Hercules, chimps in a medical facility at New York's Stony Brook University, have made headway. A judge ruled last week that Stony Brook had a case to answer. The hearing this month will resound to familiar arguments: first, that chimpanzees are intelligent, social, emotional, self-aware creatures capable of recognising their reflection, planning ahead and directing their own behaviour; alternatively, that chimps are not people and do not merit the legal protection afforded by "personhood".

But which distinctive capacities permit only homo sapiens to wear the badge of personhood? Not language: infants, the mute and those rendered speechless by dementia are protected as persons. Homo sapiens can claim superior cognition against other species but the perceived margin of difference shrinks yearly.

NhRP has a supporting affidavit from Mathias Osvath, a cognitive zoologist at Lund university in Sweden, who has studied ape behaviour. The legal privilege accorded to humans rests largely on our perceived autonomy; but, he argues, chimpanzees and other great apes also show this. He documented the case of a captive chimp hoarding pebbles in order to pelt zoo visitors the following day. Such cunning requires both memory and anticipation, which suggests a caged chimp can imagine being caged tomorrow, constituting torment.

Despite some human-like qualities, chimpanzees are not people (their proper name is pan troglodytes - they are not of the genus "homo") . The law, which makes only black-and-white judgments, is perhaps the wrong lens through which to capture the fast-moving picture on animal autonomy. The language of "rights", as others have noted, may be the wrong one.

There is a useful precedent in the relationships we cultivate with babies and other vulnerable people who, despite enjoying personhood, have limited rights and responsibilities. We act as compassionate guardians; we allow babies to explore but not to crawl on to window ledges. We should demonstrate similar responsibility and compassion for our fellow species - without pretending they are human.

The writer is a science commentator

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