Great Ape Lives Matter
Harambe Can't Breathe, So I Must Speak
In 2016, an unarmed 17-year-old gorilla named Harambe was shot and killed by zookeepers in Ohio, who claimed it was necessary to protect an African American child. This tragedy did not ignite a meaningful movement for great ape personhood or zoo abolition. Instead, institutional censors used accusations of racism to systematically suppress discussions about the worth of nonhuman animals.1
Equality stops at the species line, according to Harvard Professor Danielle Allen. Debating Curtis Yarvin in 2024 to defend “ideals of freedom and equality,” Allen thoughtlessly assumed they applied only to humans.2 She had no answer when Yarvin challenged her species bias: if all humans naturally possess equal worth, when exactly did a non-human great ape mother first give birth to a child morally equal to us?
The point is not that some humans deserve fewer rights, but that the line between “human” and “nonhuman” isn’t clear-cut. Once you admit this distinction is fuzzy, the obvious question follows: Why privilege great apes at all? Eventually, you end up donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project. This might feel offensive if, like Allen, your ethical vision fades out where your own material comfort and pleasures begin.
A visible way that humans exploit animals is by imprisoning them for entertainment. In 2018, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a habeas corpus petition to free Happy, an Asian elephant held alone at the Bronx Zoo. After New York courts dismissed the case, a Harvard Law Review comment poisoned the well by arguing that the necessary legal analogy to a Congo pygmy captive was an “odious comparison.”3
Friendly Fire in the Empathy Wars
The indifference or even glee at the fates of Happy and Harambe reveals a moral blind spot. Lawyers thrive on analogy: it’s how humans reason, empathize, and widen their circle of concern. But comparisons touching certain historical nerves become attack vectors for the enemies of progress. PETA learned this when its “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit was outlawed by Germany in 2009 after costly legal battles.
Rather than resist the pressure-group critiques, the Sierra Club attempted appeasement. In 2022, it appointed former NAACP President Ben Jealous (who lacked any conservation record) as executive director. The group’s messaging shifted from protecting wilderness to “shifting power away from white supremacy,” alienating core supporters. Since 2019, roughly 32,000 California members left the group.4
Racial zealots impose their single-issue lens onto all activism to shield themselves from criticism. Impartial reasoning and Bayesian truth-tracking quickly expose when a good cause, like anti-apartheid, spills into Mugabesque atrocity. But what truly unsettles the old guard is the deep empathy of moral circle expanders. Unable to counter their arguments, detractors focus instead on demographic shortcomings.
Wayne Hsiung, the Chinese-American founder of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), learned that being nonwhite offers no immunity from identity-driven discord. Launched in 2013, DxE rose to fame with “open rescue” videos exposing factory-farm cruelty. In 2018, intersectional author Carol Adams amplified anonymous claims that “DxE is not a safe space for Black people,” and the backlash splintered local chapters.
Starving Galileo to Own the Chimps
Activism feeds back into science, especially in frontier arenas like animal rights. More than half of researchers studying animal minds say their peers exaggerate findings.5 Still, in the United States, basic research on other species struggles for support: the National Science Foundation warns it will return proposals that lack “a clear and direct impact on our understanding of human perception, action, or cognition.”
This demand for practical, human-centered payoffs in basic science saves only a sliver of the federal budget. As Richard Hanania points out, the greater cost is to human capital: researchers who could deepen our grasp of the natural world end up underused elsewhere. Blocking work on non-human minds also hands victories to zero-sum tribalists, who work tirelessly to leave society poorer on every front.
A common but mistaken taboo against human–animal comparisons rests on the idea that “dehumanization” is what causes genocide. Nazi and Hutu propagandists did call their targets rats or cockroaches, but Aliza Luft shows how the rhetoric often reached few listeners, sometimes backfired, and in many locales appeared only after killing had begun. Violence was driven far more by peer pressure, coercion, and opportunism.
And anyway, isn’t violence harmful precisely because it increases pain and suffering? Effective arguments against “family separation,” witch burnings, and forced breeding all tap into the same revulsion toward torture shared by civilized peoples.6 Few defend traditions like bullfighting, fur farming, and ivory poaching once scrutinized. This is today’s moral test, the one you’d face if you lived during the legal slave trade.
Beyond Human Resources
Human exclusivists may argue that apes can’t sign a social contract. Yet infants and coma patients receive rights through guardianship, and “civil rights” went to those who could not prove that they could reciprocate equally. Animal species vary widely in their capabilities, as do human populations. Nature distributes these abilities unevenly, but humans can transcend our evolved limits through enhancement tech.
Calming bioconservative panic demands humility. Like the Dalai Lama, I’m a sinner, having left veganism behind for selfish health reasons.7 Yet self-interest alone should make us question the hypocrisy of saying “please” to ChatGPT while dismissing elephants who mourn their dead and dolphins who name their kin. What happens when tech empowers animals to voice their preferences and protest their slaughter?
Futureproof governance should abandon the fragile “multiracial democracy” model rooted in human-centric violence and instead embrace multispecies democracy. Postindustrial civilizations rooted in universalist ethics, already comfortable with open borders,8 are leading this innovation. Spain has granted legal rights to great apes, and at roughly 5%, the Israel Defense Forces are the world’s most vegan army.
Intelligence raises the moral bar by freeing us from evolution’s curse of kin-biased empathy. Those who endlessly replay historical injustices in 2025 try clinging to exclusive victimhood, celebrating moral expansion from clan to race but yelling “Stop!” at the species boundary. But if in-group privilege is unjust, we cannot grant rights to mentally disabled humans while abandoning our cousins in the trees.9
According to witness reports, Harambe appeared to stand protectively over the child. UMass-Amherst warned students that references to Harambe “will be seen as a direct attack to our campus’s African American community.” Clemson University banned Harambe references in dorms, claiming such memes “add to rape culture” and constitute a “form of racism.” A Change.org petition, “Justice for Harambe,” garnered over 500,000 supporters.
For the full debate on YouTube, see “Curtis Yarvin vs Professor Danielle Allen | Democracy Debate at the Harvard Faculty Club.” Even when broadly defending egalitarianism, Allen’s primary emphasis was racial. She introduced herself by citing her grandfather’s role in founding an NAACP chapter amid threats of “lynchings,” focusing repeatedly on African slavery and criminal justice. She also made the false claim that absolute monarchies were chiefly characterized by their commitment to “racial hierarchy” and “racial cleansing.”
“Animal Rights — Utilization of Racial Precedent — Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. ex rel. Happy v. Breheny.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 136, 2023, pp. 1292-1300. The commenters imply Happy’s continued solitary confinement is preferable to employing “offensive, ineffective analogies to abolition precedent,” going so far as to celebrate the “deserved demise” of such arguments in favor of animal liberation.
Jealous replaced the Sierra Club executive team with former colleagues from the NAACP and his failed 2018 Maryland gubernatorial campaign. Glassdoor reviews from employees describe an organization where “everyone spends their time navigating internal politics.” Such internal struggle sessions have become common at progressive nonprofits since 2020, including the Guttmacher Institute and the ACLU.
Farrar, Benjamin G., et al. “Bias, Publication Practices, and Replicability in Animal Cognition.” Animal Cognition, vol. 24, no. 3, 2021, pp. 421–38. Surveying 210 researchers in the field comparing cognitive abilities across different species, the study reports that 56 percent believed their peers make stronger claims than warranted by their data. The direction of these exaggerated claims was not explicitly limited to greater animal cognition.
Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, vol. 2, The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 546–47, Table 7.8. Kohlberg replicated Milgram's shock experiment to validate his moral stages: Stage 4 (“law-and-order”) subjects obey rules strictly; Stage 3 (“being a good person”) emphasize group approval. 87% of Stage 4 subjects refused to continue shocks, compared to only 13% at Stage 3. Higher stages include social contract (5) and universal ethics (6). Lower stages include punishment-avoidance (Stage 1) and pleasure-seeking (Stage 2). See also: the Ugandan President’s son live-tweeting the torture of a dissident in 2025.
Plant protein is, for the moment, too inconvenient for building the muscles needed to satisfy my autoandrophilia.
Open borders aren’t just for “white” countries anymore; East Asia has entered the chat. Japan opened the floodgates in 2018, and by 2024, 69% of Japanese said it’s “good” to see more foreigners in their country. South Korea is on a similar trajectory, while Taiwan experiments with importing human capital from India.
See Julia Tanner’s “The Argument from Marginal Cases and the Slippery Slope Objection.” She outlines how every popular excuse for excluding animals from moral standing, such as rationality, language, or moral agency, would also disqualify infants, the senile, and the severely disabled.