By Miguel Murado

DESCARTES BELIEVED that monkeys are as intelligent as men, but that they hide it to avoid having to work; that is, they are not as intelligent but more intelligent. This suspicion has persisted, especially since Darwin revealed that there is indeed a family relation, and for revealing it he had to endure all kinds of insults, including the strangest of all: to have a liquor brand named after him in Spain (called “The Monkey”, with the scientist appearing on the label stupidly portrayed as a monkey). Now, the singer and human rights activist Peter Gabriel has turned the Darwinian argument upside down by saying that, if there is something apish in man, then there must be something human about apes, and that’s why he is asking for monkeys to enjoy certain constitutional and civil rights.

The political situation of monkeys is certainly intolerable. Monkeys, like other animal, still live — let me put it this way —under the shadow of Franco: without freedom and without a constitution. Gabriel is not proposing, of course, to give them full rights and face the dangers anticipated in Planet of the Apes. This is not about making them electors and eligible (though one might suspect that the end result wouldn’t change that much). No. We’re talking here about guaranteeing them a minimum, something more like an apish reformism in the line of, say, Spain’s 1974 “Twelfth of February Spirit” of Arias Navarro fame (himself , I must say, something of a Darwinian argument personified, both for his looks and ideas).

It’s OK with me. I would only point out to Peter Gabriel that, lately, it is we people who are having some trouble with our constitutional rights, and that monkeys generally seem to live quite happily in our midst. In fact, they even enjoy some rights that are denied to humans, like euthanasia. As apes are being treated better and better in zoos, we are treated worse and worse in airports, and since 11 September, in facto, we have been losing so many civil rights that if the monkeys start to get them now, we will reach a draw sooner than Peter Gabriel thinks.

My only concern is that, before Magilla Gorilla gets his human rights, someone does something to secure those same rights to humans themselves. Because, things being as they are, it will be us who will end up precisely like the famous Three Monkeys: unable to hear, see, or speak.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 05 April 2005