Court to decide if chimps are people, too

By Jeanna Bryner

updated 3:03 p.m. ET May 29, 2008

Matthew, a 26-year-old chimp, is headed to court in Europe as part of a human effort to classify him as a person.

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.

Animal rights activist and teacher Paula Stibbe, along with the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories, says she wants the chimpanzee, named Matthew Hiasl Pan, declared a person. That way, Stibbe says she can become the primate's legal guardian if the bankrupt animal sanctuary where Matthew lives closes. (Under Austrian law, only humans are entitled to have guardians.)

The appeal has been filed in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. The case comes after Austria's Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling in January, which rejected a request to appoint the chimp with a legal guardian. The rulings did not address whether a chimpanzee could be declared a person.

"His life depends on this decision," Eberhart Theuer, the animal rights group's legal advisor, told the Evening Standard, a tabloid newspaper in London. "This case is about the fundamental question: Who is the bearer of human rights? Who is a person according to the European Human Rights Charter?"

For some scientists, the question of humanness is a tricky one, as no single characteristic separates humans from every other animal. And behaviors once thought exclusive to us, such as tool-making, exist in many non-human primates. Considered our closest living relatives, chimps behave a lot like us and even share about 96 percent of their DNA sequence with humans.

But the bottom line is, chimps are chimps, not humans, say anthropologists.

"Granted, chimpanzees show many similarities with us as humans," said John Mitani, a primate behavioral ecologist at the University of Michigan, "but they are nonetheless chimpanzees, not humans, and are obviously different as well."

Chimp characteristics
One anthropologist says the chimp dilemma brings up an animal-rights issue.

"We don't have a real formal venue for chimpanzees that have outlived their usefulness to whatever humans sort of owned them," said Jonathan Marks of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. "Obviously it's a situation that needs to be addressed, but it needs to be addressed in the realm of animal welfare. Confusing humans for chimps never did anybody any good."

But is Matthew really like you and me?

"Everybody who knows him personally will see him as a person," Stibbe told the Evening Standard.

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Yet the definition of what it means to be a person, to be human, is a work in progress.

"One of the hard things is there is no single characteristic that has been found that makes humans truly unique," said Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University. Brosnan studies social behavior and cognition in non-human primates.

Making matters worse, chimps show a smorgasbord of behaviors once tagged to humans only, including altruism, tool-use, an ability to learn from their kin and deal-making behaviors.

Looking to genetics for an answer is also thorny. If you were to line up any string of nucleotides (structural units) from a chimp's DNA with the corresponding human strand, about 96 or 98 out of 100 of the nucleotides would match up.

"Nobody is going to look at a human genome and a chimp genome and mix them up," Brosnan said. "But human genomes are different from each other, so it depends on where you draw the line."

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