Great ape personhood is a movement to extend personhood and some legal protections to the non-human members of the great ape family: bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.
Advocates include primatologists Jane Goodall and Dawn Prince-Hughes, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosophers Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, and legal scholar Steven Wise.
On February 28, 2007, the parliament of the Balearic Islands, an autonomous community of Spain, passed the world's first legislation that would effectively grant legal personhood rights to all great apes. The act sent ripples across Spain, producing public support for the rights of great apes. On June 25, 2008 a parliamentary committee set forth resolutions urging Spain to grant the primates the right to life and liberty. If approved "it will ban harmful experiments on apes and make keeping them for circuses, television commercials, or filming illegal under Spain's penal code."
These precedents followed years of European legal efforts. In 1992, Switzerland amended its constitution to recognize animals as beings and not things. However, in 1999 the Swiss constitution was completely rewritten. A decade later, Germany guaranteed rights to animals in a 2002 constitutional amendment, the first European Union member to do so.
New Zealand created specific legal protections for five great ape species in 1999. The use of gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans in research, testing or teaching is limited to activities intended to benefit these animals or its species. A New Zealand animal protection group later argued the restrictions conferred weak legal rights.
Several European countries (including Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden) have completely banned the use of great apes in animal testing. Austria was the first country to ban experimentation on lesser apes. Under EU Directive 2010/63/EU, the entire European Union banned great ape experimentation in 2013.
Argentina granted a captive orangutan basic rights in late 2014.
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Delves into a controversial animal experimentation case, ethical considerations, impacts of activism on scientific communities, and the role of scientists in public discussions.
A 7-week long (4+8 h) experiment where you plan and construct a fluorescent sensor protein starting from DNA bricks. The protein will be expressed in and purified from E.coli, characterized by bioche
The Hominidae (hɒˈmɪnᵻdiː), whose members are known as the great apes or hominids (ˈhɒmᵻnɪdz), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: Pongo (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); Gorilla (the eastern and western gorilla); Pan (the chimpanzee and the bonobo); and Homo, of which only modern humans (Homo sapiens) remain. Several revisions in classifying the great apes have caused the use of the term hominid to vary over time.
The Great Ape Project (GAP), founded in 1993, is an international organization of primatologists, anthropologists, ethicists, and others who advocate a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes that would confer basic legal rights on non-human great apes: bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. The rights suggested are the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture. The organization also monitors individual great ape activity in the United States through a census program.
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others (and others' emotions in particular). Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.
The concomitant occurrence of tissue growth and organization is a hallmark of organismal development(1-3). This often means that proliferating and differentiating cells are found at the same time in a continuously changing tissue environment. How cells ada ...