“Chimpanzees In Court”

Tuesday, May 01, 2018

The New York Times recently ran an opinion piece asking whether animals—chimpanzees in this case—should be considered persons. The reason it is even being considered that an organization called The Nonhuman Rights Project has presented a case to the New York Court of Appeals on behalf of two chimpanzees named Kiko and Tommy, who are kept as pets. The case is that these chimps' rights to freedom should be respected because they are persons with a right to liberty just like you and I are.

The chief concern of the article's writer is with our country's legal system. As he notes, "The problem is that under current United States law, one is either a 'person' or a 'thing.'" He makes the case that we should not reserve our acknowledgement of personhood for just one species—humans—but rather, we should acknowledge any being as a 'person' if it is able to meet certain criteria, "such as conscious experience, emotionality, a sense of self and bonds of care and interdependence. When it comes to whether one should be treated as a person or a thing, these kinds of features, and not their genetic bases or evolutionary histories, are what matter."

All of this is a necessary (and probably somewhat embarrassing) conclusion of our secular culture's naturalistic worldview. And the writer (perhaps unwittingly) admits the extreme fallacy of it all when he queries, "...if Kiko and Tommy can have rights, can bonobos and gorillas have rights too? What about cats, dogs and fish? What about chickens, cows and pigs? What about ants or sophisticated artificial intelligence programs? These questions are unsettling." He is right about that last bit: the questions are unsettling. But questions like that are the logical conclusion when a person's worldview is based upon the belief that humans and animals alike are only varying arrangements of mass and chemical reactions.

It's all a bit strange, isn't it? But it need not be troubling for Christians, as long as we put our trust in God's revealed will.

When God created all living things, he spoke of only one of them being made in his image. Only one created species—humanity—reflects the glory of God, which is why Christians must treat all humans with dignity and honor. Upon no other species did he bestow "personhood" in the same sense that he gave it to us. We should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and conclude that we should indiscriminately destroy or harm animal life; remember that God's first law demanded animals to be killed as sacrifices, but it also commanded that farm animals be treated with kindness (Ex. 23:12, Deut. 25:4). They are also his creatures, and he has never intended us to show wanton cruelty toward them.

But the fact remains that all human beings are made in the image of God. The unborn, the rich, the disabled, the educated, the poor, the terminally ill (see today's first article), the righteous, and the unrighteous. And so the answer to the writer's question—are chimpanzees persons?—should be a simple one.

"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.'"  (Gen. 1:26)

- Dan Lankford, minister

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