Philosophers long have pondered what separates humans from the great apes with whom we share 95 percent or more of our DNA.
Is it the ability to make and use tools? To remember the past and plan for the future? To use language? No, no and no. Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans all have demonstrated some or all of those traits.
How about basic human rights: freedom from torture, say, or freedom from exploitation? Don’t be too quick to dismiss that, either. Spain’s parliament recently passed a resolution granting legal rights to great apes.
The nonbinding resolution is part of a larger debate, spurred by animal rights activists and moral philosophers like Peter Singer of Princeton and Paola Cavalieri, who co-edited the 1995 book “Equality Beyond Humanity” that inspired the Spanish law.
Exactly what rights apes will enjoy remains to be seen. In theory, they may be proportionate to the limited legal rights of children or people with mental disabilities.
That’s not to imply a moral equivalence. But even that would make it impossible to continue using chimpanzees to study HIV, as many researchers do. It would require older zoos to improve accommodations for gorillas. And it would be the end of trained chimp acts, most of which already have disappeared.
Here in the United States — where the Supreme Court says lethal injection executions can proceed without concern for inmates’ pain and where some Americans support the torture of people — human rights for higher primates probably will be a harder sell.
Maybe that’s for the best. It is, after all, an election year. There’s already enough . . . uh, mud . . . being flung.

Bike monkey postcard from veganstraightedge via Flickr