A court in the USA appeared to give two chimpanzees the right of habeas corpus. That is the least we can do for these richly social, infinitely complex beings
By Desmond Morris
6:10AM BST 23 Apr 2015
Should Hercules and Leo be granted human rights – given the fact that they are chimpanzees, not humans? This is at the heart of an ongoing struggle in the American courts, where the two primates, kept for research at Stony Brook University, have been the subject of a habeas corpus bid to free them. This fundamental writ against unlawful detention has been used in this country for more than 800 years. For people, that is.
Like other animals, apes are protected from acts of physical cruelty by humans, but for them this is hardly enough. They are so close to us in intelligence and sensitivity that they are capable of suffering acutely from mental cruelty, and keeping a chimpanzee in solitary confinement in a research or zoo cage is always going to involve that, as they are deprived of freedom of movement and denied a social life that is part of their natural existence in the wild.
Back in the 1950s, before we knew much about them as social animals, I spent three years studying the behaviour of a young male chimp at the London Zoo. He was called Congo and he appeared with me every week on a live television programme that we transmitted from the zoo, becoming a much-loved celebrity. He lived with us in the zoo’s television unit and we became his family. The more I learned about his behaviour the more alarmed I became about the fact that we had “humanised” him.
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