They're coming out of the trees!

Beastly Behavior?

Steven Wise leans to the lectern. "I don't see a difference between a chimpanzee," he states unequivocally, "and my 4 1/2-year-old son."

In short, Wise is arguing that "nonhuman animals" are deserving of the same civil rights protection we afford "human animals." Really?

Consider Lucy, a 6-year-old chimpanzee legally kept as a pet and test subject. Smart and personable, Lucy learned American Sign Language. She greeted her human teacher every morning with a big hug and two cups of tea she made herself at the stove.

But acting "almost human" didn't protect Lucy as legal rights might have, says Wise. As often happens when aging chimps outlive their usefulness as study subjects or become hard to handle as pets, her owners sent Lucy to a chimp rehab center in Africa. Poachers shot and skinned her, and cut off her feet and hands as trophies.

They returned Lucy to the "wild," to a "chimp rehab center," where some bozos violated existing law. I don't quite see how granting her civil protections would have prevented this.

Unless, of course, we're now supposed to provide free housing, forever, for all such "nonhuman animals." And when one of them goes off the deep end, such as Koko....

On human IQ tests, Koko scores between 70 and 95 -- by human standards, slow but not retarded. She articulates emotions -- a human attribute increasingly shown in nonhuman animals in neurological and zoological research at Oxford and New York universities, among others.

Wise reports this conversation from the day after Koko bit a caretaker, and her trainer asked what she had done.

"Wrong wrong," Koko signed with her large dark fingers.

"What wrong?" her trainer signed back.

"Bite," signed Koko. "Sorry bite scratch."

"Why bite?"

"Because mad," signed Koko.

"Why mad?"

Koko signed, "Don't know."

Sounds like battery to me. If Koko and other "nonhuman animals" are entitled to protection under the law, will they also be prosecuted for crimes under that law? (I can hear the protests: "They don't understand or know the law!" Ignorance of the law is no excuse, remember?) Besides, Koko made a confession, clearly "knew" she had done wrong. And by the same measures they use for her intelligence, she's probably eligible for criminal prosecution.

But that's an area animal rights activists don't want to visit. These animals deserve our protection, deserve to be treated as human, in all regards except being held accountable for their actions. At least that's consistent with most left-wing thought. (Society is to blame!)