The Importance Of Animal Rights For Apes

For years, society had been governed by sets of rules, which states what people can and cannot do. Even though apes are our closest evolutionary ancestors, they still do not have any rights that could help protect them. Countries, such as Spain, the U.K., Sweden, Austria, Belgium, and The Netherlands, have given some rights to gorillas. These rights are used to protect these primates from experimentation, torture, and medical testing. Sadly one of the countries that does not have rights for apes is America. Even though America does not have rights for apes, there are many people who believe that apes should have rights because they too can express emotion, have families, and have the ability to understand language. Jane Goodall was one of the most important people to advocate for the rights of gorillas. Due to her book, The Great Ape Project, people learned that humans are more closely related to apes than any other creature on earth. This book not only advocated for gorillas to have rights, but it also promoted that chimpanzees, bamboos, and orangutans should have the same rights as us. Since Jane Goodall, people have come to the realization that we share 98.7 percent of our DNA with apes. This realization has led to animal rights activists to fight for apes to have human rights. Many countries, such as the U.K. and New …show more content…
Another reason why apes are not allowed to have the same rights as humans is because of their use in medical testing. Apes are normally used to test vaccines that we use, which makes many scientists afraid that without being able to test vaccines on animals, the amount of vaccines made will be reduced and doctors will not be able to treat