By emphasizing their kinship with us, we can easily consign apes to a role as children or simply as "inferior" people. If, as some researchers estimate, chimpanzees have 98% of the same DNA as human beings, does that mean that they are only 2% inferior? Or that gorillas are only 3 or 4 % inferior? Whatever legal implications people may see in this idea, it certainly will not make apes seem very interesting.
And if we choose to regard apes as children, it must be children who will never grown up. This may address Victorian fantasies about the innocence of childhood, which we often see in the fantasy of bonobos as "hippy chimps," but this is a very limited, and superficial, appeal....
