Are Apes People Too? PDF format

Extending “Human Rights” to the Great Apes (and “Rights” to Other Animals, and Maybe Even Plants!)

Shaun Willcock

  We are told, by the so-called “experts”, that modern man is highly “evolved” and of great “intelligence”.  Yet after (supposedly) billions of years of (again, supposed) evolution, all we have are daily proofs of his utter spiritual blindness and stupidity.  Sometimes, monumentally so.

New Zealand Takes the Lead, Gives Protection to Apes It Doesn’t Have

In 1999 New Zealand became the first country in the world to pass a law recognising the feelings and status of the great apes as “man’s closest relatives”.  This means chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.  Yes, these ambling anthropoids are our closest relatives – that is, according to evolutionary theory.  But there’s nothing true about this, it has simply been told to the world like a parent reading a bedtime story to children.  Except, in this case, the parent never tells the children the story is just that: a story; a tale.  It’s presented to them as fact.  Human beings are classified, by these geniuses, as just another species of great ape.

New Zealand’s legal looniness was called the Animal Welfare Act, and it prohibited the use of the great apes in research, testing or teaching, unless this use would be in the best interests of the apes themselves.  It prohibited the use of these animals for experiments that would be of use to humans.

It was easy, of course, for New Zealand to make such legislation, because – apart from those which may exist in captivity – there aren’t any great apes shambling around New Zealand!  The absurdity of it all seemed to have escaped the notice of those who hailed it as a great victory – a country legislating protection for creatures it doesn’t have.

Now I don’t know about you, reader, but it strikes me that there’s nothing too flattering about being told I’m related to a scratching, flea-eating vine-swinger.  I suspect that most people would find it highly embarrassing to attend a family reunion and introduce long-lost cousin Charlie the Chimpanzee to the assembled aunts and uncles – especially when Charlie goes face down into the fruit salad, or puts the ice cream on his head.  Don’t misunderstand me, I like the critters, I really do.  They are often playful and fun to watch, some are awe-inspiring, and all of the great apes are intelligent (for animals!).  But apes are apes and men are men, and that’s all there is to it.  In a word, they are animals, and man is not.  Oh sure, he acts like one, and worse than one in fact; but he is not one.  On the sixth day of creation, “God made the beast of the earth after his kind” (Gen. 1:25); and then He made man, in His very own image, after His likeness (Gen. 1:25-27).

Not so, say the evolutionists: the great apes and man evolved over millions of years from a common ancestor.  They have no proof of this, of course, just as they have none for any of their other absurd evolutionary theories; but they never let the absence of proof, of any actual facts, get in the way of their story.  It is put forward as perfectly logical, a “scientific” answer to what they consider to be the “absurd fantasy” of biblical creationism!

But it is not science, it is “science falsely so called” (1 Tim. 6:20), and the real fantasy is that men – or apes for that matter – evolved from anything.  They mock biblical creationism, yet what they put in its place is a “Just So” story which makes anything Rudyard Kipling wrote pale in comparison.

Campaigning for Apes to Have “Rights” Not Given to Humans!

The ground-breaking New Zealand legislation in 1999 was hailed by an organisation known as the Great Ape Project (GAP), which had brought the bill before the New Zealand parliament.  Its vice-president, Paul Waldau, said, “Ultimately, GAP would like to see the non-human great apes accorded standing in legal systems throughout the world.  This would permit them to be protected by rights to life, liberty and freedom from torture.”

Note the reference to the apes as the “non-human great apes”.  Once again, we’re being constantly indoctrinated, conditioned into thinking of the apes as our “relatives”.  We’re the “human great apes”, they’re the “non-human” ones.  But we’re all apes – that’s the point.  This is what the teaching of evolution has done to men: it has convinced them that we’re all nothing but apes, and therefore the “other” apes deserve equal treatment before the law!

GAP demanded from the United Nations a declaration of “Rights of the Great Apes” similar to the New Zealand act, but it went even further: it demanded that these creatures could not be put behind bars without a court’s decision!  GAP compared its fight against injustice in the treatment of the great apes with the fight for the “rights” of women, sodomites, and disabled people.

Indeed, those who are pushing “animal rights” are very often the same “progressives” who believe in the need for human abortion and the deliberate murder of the elderly or sick.  They deny “human rights” to humans, but want to extend “human rights” to apes!  The co-founder of the Great Ape Project, Peter Singer, a rabid evolutionist, fully supports abortion, infanticide and euthanasia (assisted murder).  He is on record as saying that the human embryo, at least until it develops a nervous system, is the moral equivalent of a lettuce.[1]

It’s a twisted, warped world all right.  As unborn children are routinely murdered by the multiplied millions every year in their mothers’ wombs, having absolutely no “rights” to life, liberty or freedom from torture, the beasts of the field are being granted the very “rights” denied to humans!  This is how far the world has sunk into sin and stupidity.  A mother can walk into an abortion clinic and have her baby murdered in hideous ways in her womb, and this is hailed as “a woman’s right to do as she pleases with her own body” (even though the child in her womb is another, separate human being entirely).  That aborted little human being was denied life, liberty and freedom from torture.  But an ape is to be protected from death, pain or the loss of freedom!

Even terrorism is excused by these “animal rights” people.  Ingrid Newkirk, of PETA (the so-called “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”), a radical animal-rights organisation, once “protested to Yasser Arafat [the murderous terrorist leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation] because a terrorist attack used a donkey strapped with explosives – but she said it was not her business to protest against the innocent human lives lost in suicide bombings, just to ‘leave the animals out of this conflict’.  So once again, elevating animals really amounts to trivializing atrocities against humans.”[2]

It has been well put that, “In a strangely Orwellian paradox, in their mind [the minds of “animal rights” advocates], some animals are people, but some humans aren’t.”[3]

The Nazis: “Rights” for Animals, Not for Jews

It is very significant indeed that, since “birds of a feather flock together”, we find that the Nazis were often committed “animal rights” activists!  This is because Nazism believed strongly in evolution.  The Nazis could seek the utter extinction of “non-Aryan” people by mass murder, and yet frequently balked at the thought of killing an animal!  Listen to this quote:

“How can you find pleasure in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood, innocent, defenceless, and unsuspecting?  It’s really pure murder.”  It sounds like something out of the mouth of some radical modern “animal rights” activist.  But no.  It was said by none other than the Nazi leader, Heinrich Himmler – a man who had no qualms about the mass murder of Jews![4]

And then there is the man who prohibited “the unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments”, and intimidated “those who still think they can treat animals as inanimate property” by threatening them with being sent to concentration camps.  Yes, these were words spoken by another Nazi leader, Hermann Goering![5] He could not bear to think of animals suffering in experiments conducted by humans – and yet he was perfectly content for hideous experiments to be conducted on Jews and other human beings!

“Speciesism”: Discrimination against Other Species (Yes, It’s Coming!)

How do these people come up with any kind of justification for this garbage?  How do they convince supposedly sane people to believe this stuff?

One method is, of course, to blather on about how the great apes are the “closest relatives” of humans.  They point to the similarity between human and ape DNA.  According to GAP, humans and chimpanzees only have a 0.5% to 1.25% difference in their DNA.  Actually, the truth is that humans and apes probably share around 95% DNA similarity.  But it’s nowhere near as simple as saying, “Our DNA is 95% the same.”  Even New Scientist magazine, a very pro-evolution magazine indeed, said that this argument could not be used, as even a few genetic differences in reality add up to a vast amount of differences, so complex is life in all its forms.[6]

But there is another method being used: the cry of “speciesism”.  “Speciesism”, according to the looney left, is committed when an uncaring, unfeeling, heartless human believes he is superior to an animal, and innately different from an animal, and thus has rights which the poor animal does not have.  No, this is not a joke.  We’ve had the terms “racism” and “sexism” shoved down our throats almost every single day, for many decades, by leftists/liberals.  And they have been so successful in their campaign of indoctrination that people shun, like the plague, being branded as “racist” or “sexist”.  Well, it has worked so well for the liberal/leftist cause that they decided to create yet another “ism”: “speciesism.”  And they will bang on about it, over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, until – just like “racism” and “sexism” – everyone will be terrified of being branded as a “speciesist”.

This is not mere speculation.  Steven Wise, founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, which wants to obtain “legal persons” status for chimpanzees (!), spoke in 2013 at the “Personhood Beyond the Human” conference at Yale University (yes, academics are actually debating these insane ideas), and he stated that to deny chimpanzees their liberty was nothing less than “species discrimination”, which he likened to racial discrimination![7]

How long will it be before we hear leftists/liberals including a new term in their stupid, endless chant: that we must be “non-racist, non-sexist, and non-speciesist”.

We note, however, that these “non-speciesist” humans are selective “non-speciesists”.  Logically, if one is not going to “discriminate against other species”, this must mean all other species.  One surely cannot pick and choose.  After all, these same people would never allow a white person, say, to claim that he is “non-racist” because he doesn’t discriminate against black people, when at the same time he discriminates against brown people.  But logic has never been thick on the ground in liberal/leftist circles.  And when it comes to “species discrimination”, well, that’s all very well for them – as long as the species they’re not to discriminate against is likeable, or cuddly, or attractive, or fun, or cute.  We hear many loud calls to “Save the Dolphins!” – but no matter how we strain our ears we just don’t hear calls to “Save the Tuna”!  Why not?  Well, people are very fond of dolphins: they seem to be smiling all the time, they squeak endearingly, they’re playful and cute and all the rest of it.  People are very fond of tuna, too – but in a more mouth-watering way.  Of course, there are many animal rights activists who don’t want us to like eating tuna, or any other creature for that matter, and want the whole human population to munch contentedly through things like lettuce and carrots only.  Or maybe not even these.  After all, plants may deserve “rights” as well, according to some.  No, this is not a joke.  Read all about it a little further on.

But even if the animal rights activists don’t want us to discriminate against certain species by eating them, they themselves still discriminate against some creatures!  I think we’re on pretty safe ground to say that almost all of them, while chanting “Give rights to the great apes!” would be rather backward in coming forward to chant, “Give rights to rats, roaches and fleas!”  Not likely.  We can very safely say that even if they don’t use poisons to wipe out the unwelcome little beasties (“because these harm Mother Earth, you know!”), they make use of some kind of lethal weapon to annihilate the living things they don’t want crawling over their pantries or their persons.

But this is “selective speciesism”!  The same people would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone saying, “I love whites but not blacks”, and yet they in effect say, “I love apes but not ants!”  As they believe that evolution is true, to be consistent they must believe that all life is then related ; and if this is so, then chiggers have as much of a right to life as chimps, and to a good “quality of life” too.

And it’s no good them saying, “But cockroaches disgust me!” or, “But lice are filthy!” Why, that’s speciesist!  They should be ashamed of themselves!

Evolutionary “Natural Selection” Morphs into Interfering Human Protection!

The animal rights activists are utterly inconsistent with their own beliefs.  And this makes them hypocrites.

Darwin wrote of evolution in terms of “survival of the fittest”.  Natural selection, according to evolution, means that some species survive, others don’t; some evolve, others fall by the wayside; and this (they claim) has been going on for millions and millions of years.  So then: why do they want to interfere in the process now, and save some species and treat them “humanely”?

They have created a massive dilemma for themselves.  According to evolutionary theory, the strong and fit survive, the weak perish; and gradually, over millions of years, man evolved from some ape-like ancestor.  Man, therefore, is one of the fit.  The fittest of all, in fact.  Man has “evolved” to the point where he rules the planet.  For millions of years, so they tell us, the gradual evolution of man meant that he had to walk roughshod over many other species to reach his dominant position.  For millions of years he had to kill other species; to eat other species; to use the pelts of other species to keep him warm.  And during those millions of years, other species undoubtedly went extinct so that man could continue to evolve and succeed where other, less fit species failed.  This, they would say, was all right; it was “nature’s way”; it was blind chance, natural selection at work.  But that was then and this is now.  Now, they tell us, man – the creature they claim reached his dominant position by natural selection – must interfere in natural selection, and prevent other species from going extinct!

Man-made “interference” in the evolutionary process of natural selection?  Well then, it’s no longer natural selection, is it?  It’s man’s selection! So they are telling us that natural selection was all well and good for the past umpteen million years, but what was good enough for dinosaurs and sabre-toothed tigers is not good enough for great apes or dolphins.  Man must step in, treating them kindly, saving them from extinction because they’re too weak to save themselves, and granting them the “rights” to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  “Rights”, by the way, which none of the carnivores of the animal world would ever grant to other creatures!  Chimps in the wild frequently hunt monkeys in packs; dolphins eat other fish.  Try convincing them to act kindly to their fellow-creatures, and switch to a meatless diet.  Tossing a lettuce into the dolphin tank instead of the usual fish they eat is not going to result in cute squeaks of contentment.

This is not an evolutionary way of approaching the natural world!  Ironically, the very evolutionists who campaign so hard for “animal rights” do not grasp the fact that evolution does not provide them with any reason for doing so!  Caring for the animal creation, showing kindness to animals – evolution says, “No!  ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ – that’s what’s real!  The weak must go extinct; only the fit must survive.”  Evolution has no morality.  It is blind chance.

Spain Considers Giving “Human Rights” to Apes

Well, the Great Ape Project continued to push its agenda; so it was ecstatic when, in 2008, Spain’s Congress of Deputies gave consideration to a bill that would extend “human rights” to apes.  The environmental commission of Spain’s parliament voted to approve resolutions committing the country to the Great Apes Project.  The resolution called on the government to promote GAP internationally and to ensure the protection of apes from “abuse, torture and death”.  Not only was it the plan to outlaw harmful experiments on apes, but it was even proposed that the use of apes in circuses, TV commercials and filming should be banned as well.

Pedro Pozas, the Spanish director of GAP, said, “This is a historic moment in the struggle for animal rights.  It will doubtless be remembered as a key moment in the defence of our evolutionary comrades.”

Note the merging of Communist terminology with the apes’ “rights”: he spoke of the “struggle”, and of the apes being our “evolutionary comrades”.  In this way the whole issue is tied in to leftist political “struggles” (certainly one of the left’s favourite phrases), which is most certainly the plan, for then it makes it appear that this particular “struggle” is no different from political “struggles” the world over, whether for political power, for women’s “liberation”, or for so-called “gay rights”.

And what nonsense anyway – “our evolutionary comrades”!  No right-thinking human being feels any comradely closeness with any great ape.  The Lord has put them on this earth to display His power and infinite variety in creation; they are interesting, fascinating, often funny creatures; and they give us much pleasure to watch and study.  But are they our “comrades”?  Hardly.  Here’s the definition of the word “comrade”: “a ‘chum’; esp. a fellow-soldier; hence gen. an associate in friendship, occupation, fortunes, etc., mate.”  Well then, in no sense whatsoever is a great ape my comrade.  We’re not chums, we don’t serve in any army together and never will, we’re not associates in friendship, we certainly don’t have the same occupations, we don’t share the same fortunes, and we’re not mates.  To talk of humans and great apes as “comrades” is a complete fallacy.  And as for being “evolutionary comrades”, well, that’s taking absurdity to even greater heights.

And again, as with New Zealand, Spain has no great apes of its own anyway!  It has some Barbary macaques on Gibraltar; but these are monkeys, not great apes.  The Madrid daily, El Mundo, said in an editorial that the only apes in Spain were “the ones that could cross over from Gibraltar”, and questioned why the country should become “the principal flag-bearer of the apes’ cause”.  There’s something just downright odd about a country wasting time and money, legislating protection for creatures it doesn’t even have.

And anyway, Spain is the land of bull-fighting!  So let’s get this straight: legislators in Spain wanted great apes (which Spain does not have) to be given “rights” which would protect them from death and torture, and yet bulls (which Spain has in abundance, and which bullfighters kill on a regular basis) have no such “rights”.

Pozas’ answer to this clearly absurd state of affairs was telling: he said the vote would set a precedent, establishing legal rights for animals that could be extended to other species.  “We are seeking to break the species barrier – we are just the point of the spear”, he said.

What’s next – are we going to see “ape rights” activists screaming, “Apes are people too”?

Surely it’s coming.

Frivolous Lawsuits in the United States on Behalf of Chimpanzees

The madness just goes from bad, to worse, to even worse.  In 2014, an organisation called the Nonhuman Rights Project filed lawsuits in the United States on behalf of chimpanzees – again, as with New Zealand and Spain, an animal the U.S. does not have (and I think we can safely presume the chimps did not ask them to do this).  The group claimed that chimps were “nonhuman animals” and therefore they had a “right” (here we go again) to live free from confinement, and not to be regarded as property but as “legal persons.”  Here are the very words on the group’s website: “These habeas corpus writs are a way of going before the court to argue that our chimpanzee plaintiffs are legal persons with the fundamental right to bodily liberty, based on their level of complex cognition, self-awareness and autonomy, rather than simply pieces of property that can be owned, imprisoned and used for experiments.”[8]  Well, no, actually: these writs are a way of wasting the courts’ time.  Sadly, the founder of the organisation, a lawyer named Steven Wise, made it his life’s work to build a case and argue before a judge that an animal is a legal entity with rights of its own.  What a waste of a life!

Wise’s ardent belief in the fantasy of evolution led him to make the awful statement: “I don’t see any difference between a chimpanzee and my 4 ½ year old son.”[9]  Nice one, Dad – your 4 ½ year old presumably told you he loved you, sat on your knee and spoke to you, maybe sang songs with you, asked you questions about life, built things out of toy blocks with you on the carpet, learned to read and draw, and later you would teach him to drive a car, and do all the other things Dads do with their growing sons.  I’m guessing you weren’t experiencing any of these moments with a chimpanzee, and even if you had tried to, you would have learned very fast that chimps might slobber on you and throw their arms around you, but that’s about the extent of their affection.  No chimp ever told his father he loved him, or listened as Dad read him a bedtime story, or joined him in singing children’s songs, or asked him a single question about anything.  And I don’t think you’d try to teach him to drive (although with people like this, one never knows what lunacy they’re prepared to attempt).  Oh, and then there’s that matter of your son possessing an eternal soul – but of course you wouldn’t believe in that, even though disbelieving it doesn’t make it any less true.  The gulf between humans and chimps is infinitely vast, and absolutely unbridgeable.

“The primary argument against giving non-humans these sorts of rights is simple: they are not humans.  They do not have cognition skills comparable to humans, and they could not exercise human rights even if we gave them to them.  This is because humans are uniquely created in the image of God.  Apes cannot participate in a Republic or set up a monarchy; they cannot create art; they cannot contemplate their own existence and inevitable demise.  They can’t even come close to real language.  They are delightful, clever animals, but only animals.  There is a yawning chasm separating them and all other animals from humans.”[10]  And again, there’s that matter of the eternal human soul.

To people like these, evolution means that a human and an ape are no different.  Humans are lowered to the level of apes, and apes are lifted to the level of humans.

Argentinian Court Grants an Orangutan Some Human “Rights”

Forget about Darwin’s “Ascent of Man” tomfoolery: the descent of man into absurdity and insanity continues.  In 2015 a court in Argentina made history when it granted an orangutan named Sandra some legal human “rights”!  Lawyers for Argentina’s Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights said that Sandra was a “person” in the philosophical, not biological, sense – and that she was in a situation of illegal deprivation of freedom as a “non-human person.”[11]

Will Killing an Ape Eventually be Considered Murder?

Will the time come when men who kill an ape be tried in courts for murder?

If that sounds too far-fetched, don’t be too quick to laugh it off.  Years ago already, in the United States, there was what was described as an “explosion of interest” shown by law schools in the status of animals; and the famed Harvard University decided to offer an “animal law course” in 2000!  Add all this insanity to all that has been covered above, and it seems safe to say that the day is coming when it will be considered murder to kill a great ape.

If Apes are Given Human “Rights”, What about Human Responsibilities?

So: if apes are to have human “rights”, will they also be expected to have human responsibilities?  After all, with rights come responsibilities.  If they are to have the “right to life”, will they be held responsible, and punished accordingly, if they take away the “right to life” of a human being, or even of another ape, by killing him?  Will they be tried in court, just like human beings?  Will they be entitled to legal representation and a fair trial?  Will they be allowed to choose their own lawyers?  Will an ape, in fact, be tried for murder if he kills another ape, or a human being?  And how will his crime be explained to the guilty ape?  In which ape language? (oh, wait, they don’t have any).  Such considerations just show how utterly absurd this entire issue is.  Men will be punished if they deny the “human rights” of “life, liberty and freedom from torture” to the great apes – but it is probably safe to assume that the apes themselves will not be punished in a similar fashion if they deny the same “human rights” to other apes or to men!

Oh, and I think it was Bill Clinton who said that it was a “basic human right” for everyone to own a TV.  Presumably, then, all great apes will also demand the right (through their lawyers, of course, who will claim to be able to understand what their clients want) to be able to watch their favourite sports channels.  Difficult to grant their desires, however, considering all the great apes (the activists are arguing) must be set free and returned to jungles and forests – where TV reception might prove a problem, to say the least.

The Proper Perspective

As I said above, I’m very fond of the apes.  They are a wonderful part of God’s great creation.  It would be a tragic day indeed if the last chimp, or gorilla, or orangutan was killed, and these fascinating creatures joined the ranks of species now deemed extinct.  They should be preserved, and some places should be conserved as natural habitats for them, where they can live unmolested by man.  What a tragedy if our children only saw these magnificent creatures in picture-books or documentaries.  The Bible forbids unnecessary cruelty to animals (Prov. 12:10), and indeed the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), which unfortunately today often goes way too far into “animal rights” and other ridiculous excesses, was co-founded by William Wilberforce, a true Christian better known for his wonderful work in bringing about the abolition of the slave trade.

But still, they are animals.  They are animals just as elephants are animals, or dolphins, or lions.  They are not our “closest relatives”.  Adam was a unique creation of God, fashioned from the dust of the ground, the breath of life breathed into his nostrils by God Himself (Gen. 2:7).  His descendants are no more related to chimps and gorillas than to dogs or cats or goldfish.

And Now We’re Told: Plants Have “Rights” Too!

What about the next “logical” step (not that there’s anything logical in all this radical environmentalist insanity) – the “rights” of plants?

Yes, you read correctly.  “Have you mowed your lawn lately?  If so, you may have committed a grave ‘plants rights’ crime, according to the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Biotechnology.”[12]  In a report issued by this committee, which clearly had way too much time on its hands, it was argued that plants may deserve almost the same reverence as human life.

Apparently, there were those on this bright-spark panel who, boldly breaking away from their fellows, went out on a limb and, with commendable far-sightedness, felt that if humans treat plants with the same ethical status as animals, life would be very inconvenient for us humans.  Well, yes, I suppose that’s one way of putting it: inconvenient.  If we can’t eat either animals or plants because it is unethical, life will certainly become just a tad inconvenient.  Inconvenient and short.

Others on the panel argued that plants should not be harmed without “justification”.  Presumably, it would be justified to eat them, or we’ll be back to the “inconvenient” thing.  And why should they not be harmed?  Oh, because they “strive for something” (such as to develop or reproduce), and are (we are told) much like humans on the molecular level.

Convinced yet?  No, nor am I.  But wait, there’s more from the panel of plant-lovers:

It was agreed by them all that plants should not be harmed arbitrarily; and that any decisions involving the harming or killing of plants should only be made with the plant’s own inherent value being taken into consideration (with this kind of moral dilemma swirling around in her head, will Mom ever get down to just cooking that meal?).

So are plants sentient? Close to half of the panel thought not.  They felt plants were unaware of what was going on around them.  But incredibly, the majority thought they just might be, or that it was an unanswerable question.

Concluding, the panel decided that humans do not have the right to treat plants as they like.  Plants are alive, and therefore have inherent value, they claimed.  For this reason also, there cannot be absolute ownership of plants, they added.  As one witty journalist put it, “This may very well mean that the houseplant by your window is suffering the equivalent of slavery.”[13]

Perhaps one day the only plants we will be permitted to eat, by these herb-huggers, will be those which are clearly droopy and dying and which therefore need to be “euthanased”.  They’ll be telling us, “It’s a kindness, really.  They’re suffering and we’re putting them out of their misery.  And just as we find plenty of uses for the bodies of humans who are killed in the womb or in old age, so we can eat ‘euthanased’ plants with a clear conscience.”

Is your head spinning, dear reader?  Are you thinking, “Are these people for real?  Are they insane?”  You are not alone.  Normal human beings find it hard to believe that there are actually people out there, claiming to be scientists, who give serious consideration to this nonsense.  They abort human babies without batting an eyelid; they are willing to put the elderly to death; but they sit behind closed doors and gravely ponder whether or not plants should have “rights”.

And someone else pays them for this drivel.

Conclusion

We humans have dominion over the creation (Gen. 1:26).  We rule.  This is God’s will.  Picking a flower does not constitute decapitation, and cooking plants is not torture and murder.  They are not conscious.  They do not feel pain.  There are only two things we humans can eat: plants and meat (Gen. 1:29,30; 2:16,17; 9:3).  Those are the only two choices we have.  Deriving nutrition from sand and stones is, we predict, going to be beyond the reach of science until, well, forever.

Welcome to the twenty-first century: criminals go free, murderers don’t get the death penalty, the unborn are murdered by men and women supposedly dedicated to preserving, not snuffing out, life – and the great apes, and other animals, and maybe even plants one day, have rights.  What an upside-down world it has become.  It increasingly looks like a giant madhouse, and the lunatics are running this global asylum.

This is Charles Darwin’s insane legacy.

Shaun Willcock is a minister, author and researcher.  He runs Bible Based Ministries.  Originally published in 2000 as “Monkey Business: New Zealand Gives ‘Rights’ to the Great Apes,” an enlarged version was published in 2009, and enlarged and published again in 2017 under the present title.  For other pamphlets (which may be downloaded and printed), as well as details about his books, audio messages, articles, etc., please visit the Bible Based Ministries website; or write to the address below.  If you would like to be on Bible Based Ministries’ email list, please send your details.

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