Animals and human rights

I was reading USA Today the other morning (strange what staying in a hotel does for you!), and came across an article about moves in Europe to give certain "human" rights to apes. From memory, one instance was Spain about to legislate on the subject, and another was a story from Austria about someone petitioning the European Court of Human Rights to allow certain rights to a particular great ape: specfically, the recognition of its right to life, and the appointment of a legal guardian.

Now, let's leave aside well-worn (but rather valid) arguments about rights going hand-in-hand with responsibilities (it's a long time since a horse was last tried for murder), and comments about man (solely) being made in God's image. Moreover, I'll not explore Jason Clark's Is Christianity Irredeemably Speciesist?.

What really bothers me is the shape of the current argument: the rather naive observation that higher mammals are rather like young children, or certain handicapped people: capable of high degrees of cognition and communication, yet not sufficiently developed to be able to function independently in society. I say 'naive', because the comparison is rather selective, and tends to ignore the ways in which these animals are quite unlike people - young, old, or otherwise.

I'm less worried about extending further rights to animals; I'm more worried about the comparison running the other way - that children and handicapped people are somewhat less than human. If they are on a par with great apes, then eventually they have less human rights than you and I. That flies in the face of everything which has been achieved with Bills of Rights, the Universal Declaration, the European Convention, and the rest.

It's not very postmodern of me, but I'm inclined to think that, as a general principle, the notion of certain inalienable rights for all human beings is a good thing. Extending certain rights to animals seems to dilute, rather than strengthen, that position. And that worries me.