Monkey business (yes, I know chimps aren't really monkeys, it's just "chimp business" or "ape business" doesn't have the same ring)

(Lilli Strauss AP photo)

This will certainly be interesting:

The European Court of Human Rights is to hear an appeal to declare an abandoned chimp a human in order to appoint a legal guardian for it. Since humans are the only ones under Austrian law (where the chimp lives) who can have guardians, a woman is asking to court to declare the chimp human. As the news report wryly notes:

Beyond the legal challenges, anthropologists say chimpanzees are not humans, though without a clear definition of what it means to be human, backing that claim up is a challenge perhaps fit for some great courtroom drama.

Really? You think there might be courtroom drama? Forget the courtroom, what does this do to our definition of human beyond this single case? The article points to the same problem that my dissertation often points to - the difficulty in defining what a human is, particularly when compared with intelligent machines (or animals in this case).

The article quotes only people who talk about how difficult it is to make a determination of human characteristics that are unique to humans, but buries the one argument - language - in a link that doesn't really match the argument. But the innate capacity to manipulate language that comes so easily to humans might be one. Yes, there are humans who don't have language, so I don't know that it's foolproof, but it might be a place to start.

What the article never brings up are alternate solutions to this problem. A chimp can still be property, can it not? Can the woman who wants to be a guardian to the chimp not simply purchase it? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems a much easier solution for caring for the chimp than having it declared a human with all the rights that entails...