See that arresting picture of an endangered crested black macaque? It's a selfie, taken by the monkey. There is a story going around about it: At issue is whether the human primate, David Slater, who owned the camera the monkey used, has a legal claim on the image. He wants Wikimedia to take the photograph down on the grounds that it is “his," but Wikimedia has countered that because the non-human primate took the photo and not Slater, it is in the public domain. Though this little story provides a welcome distraction from the depressing world news this week, there are some serious questions that it also provokes about the “rights” of non-human animals.

#### Lori Gruen ##### About Lori Gruen is Professor of Philosophy, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University where she also coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. Her work lies at the intersection of ethical theory and practice, with a particular focus on issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations. Her most recent books are "[The Ethics of Captivity](http://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-ethics-of-captivity-9780199978007?cc=us&lang=en&)" and "[Ecofeminism](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ecofeminism-feminist-intersections-with-other-animals-and-the-earth-9781628926224/)."

Of course the idea that monkeys could hold copyrights to photographs they take seems laughable. Legal rights of this sort are reserved only for competent human adults who are in a position to act upon these rights, right? Well, no. They are also reserved for collections of human adults thought of as “corporations”. And there are also legal rights that extend to human children and others who are not able, for any number of reasons, to act on their own behalf to protect their rights.

Last December, this curious feature of the law led the Nonhuman Animal Rights project to file writs of habeaus corpus for four chimpanzees living in New York. The cases were dismissed—but they will be appealed on the grounds that there are certain valuable capacities that the law protects even if the individual right holder can’t bring their claims to court, such as the right to bodily freedom and the right not to be held captive and denied that freedom without due process.

Other animals, particularly non-human primates, are so similar to human primates that many have argued that some legal rights should be extended to them.

>Like the best of us, great apes sacrifice their own safety by staying with sick or injured family members so that the fatally ill will not die alone.

Observational and cognitive research has shown that many non-human animals have rich social relationships like we do. Like the best of us, they sacrifice their own safety by staying with sick or injured family members so that the fatally ill will not die alone. They grieve their dead like we do; respond to emotional states of others like we do; engage in norm-governed behavior like we do; manipulate and deceive like we do; understand symbolic representations like we do; and they laugh and play and pass along culture just like we do.

Research with the great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, and humans (think the cast of Planet of the Apes)—suggests that they have distinctive personalities, a sense of self, and that they think ahead and plan. So if the other great apes are so much like us, why not extend some of our legal rights to them?

For one thing, in this case copyrights are a culturally and economically specific kind of right; it seems ridiculous to think that other animals would even be interested in such things. What would the macaque in question do with its copyright of that picture? But there are many other values protected by human rights that non-human animals share: the right to be free from arbitrary capture and control, the right not to be harmed, the right to live with others of one’s kind, and the right not to be killed.

Extending these negative rights to other animals doesn’t seem so odd.

>Rights are claims that we make against each other and assert to protect ourselves from the encroachment of others.

Nonetheless, I have misgivings about the “rights” approach. Rights are claims that we make against each other and assert to protect ourselves from the encroachment of others. Our legal system is structured in such a way as to see rights holders at odds with one another. This is a fairly grim view of how we interact with one another in our communities and even if it looks as though we can’t do much better, I would hope that we can try to imagine less destructive, less combative ways of living.

The discussion about who holds the copyright for the photograph of the monkey, for example, has focused on the profit the human photographer has lost as the result of the image being in the public domain. But I am not aware of anyone arguing about raising funds from sales to protect the endangered subject of the photograph. A central part of the rights framework is that narrow self interests are protected, while promotion of the greater good or protection from habitat loss is obscured. The rights framework may be useful as a backdrop when other ways of resolving conflicts fail, but it can also perpetuate an individualistic view that allows us to avoid examining our connections with each other and with other animals. When we end up focused on what we can extract from each other or how we can protect what we have, we might not try to imagine how to work together to improve each other’s lives.

Almost all of our actions and decisions affect other animals in a variety of ways. Whether they live or die, whether their offspring have any future, whether their habitats will continue to exist in order for individual monkeys to even take “selfies” depend on what we buy, what we eat, even who we vote for. If we want to live in a world in which crested black macaques exist in the flesh, not just in photographs, we need to look beyond rights and start thinking hard about making the relationships we are in with other animals better and more sustainable.