Abstract

The law typically treats great apes and other non-humans as property and not as persons. This is so, even though great apes have cognitive abilities that exceed those of some mentally-deficient humans. Nevertheless, these humans are entitled to the full range of personhood rights, while apes are entitled to none of them. Without attempting to resolve this discrepancy, I suggest more modestly that those rights we do extend to apes under the Animal Welfare Act might be more easily safeguarded if we were to extend legal standing to apes, allowing suit to be brought on their behalf by human guardians. Doing so would not require us to view apes as persons but would provide increased protections for these surprisingly intelligent creatures.