Animal Law Commons^™

A Step At A Time: New Zealand's Progress Toward Homonid Rights, Rowan Taylor

Animal Law Review

All members of the Homindae Family (humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) share complex cognitive aptitudes not shared by most other animals. Yet only human hominids have legal rights to life and personal security. The campaign to win fundamental rights for all hominids took a small but significant step forward in 1999 when New Zealand's Animal Welfare Act banned the use of non-human hominids in research, testing, and teaching except where such uses are in the hominids' best interests. In preventing human interests from trumping non-human ones, the Act took a first step toward dismantling speciesism within the hominid family. …