By Walker Laughlin
As U.S. citizens, we
enjoy legal personhood––we have protection under common law and the privilege
to sue others. And, strange as it may seem, our country’s corporations, schools
and law firms hold a similar classification as us in court. But animals are considered
legal “things.” They possess no legal rights. Steven Wise, a professor of
animal law and the president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, is trying to
change that.
Wise wants to break what
he calls the “wall” between animals and humans––the divide that protects people
from abuse, but leaves sophisticated creatures like elephants and cetaceans in
cages. Now representing four chimpanzees––all of them detained in New York
universities, backyards or warehouses––Wise feels that considering weak animal
protection laws and centuries of exploitation, the only proper protection for
autonomous species is habeas corpus, a common law writ that protects legal
“persons” from unlawful imprisonment.
Wise notes that
corporations have been represented as legal “persons” for centuries, yet
animals have always held the legal classification of a “thing.” But affidavits
from chimpanzee cognitive experts around the world attest to the intelligence
of chimpanzees. Wielding “over 400 scientific works that altogether demonstrate
for sure that chimpanzees are indeed autonomous beings,” the Nonhuman Rights
Project hopes to convince state judges that their nonhuman clients possess the
intelligence deserving of habeas corpus.
The NhRP chose its legal
strategy carefully. After assessing the jurisdictions of 20 countries and all
50 U.S. states over a seven-year period, Wise and his team chose to fight for
nonhuman personhood in the courts of New York. The state allows the NhRP to
re-file cases repeatedly and in different places. New York courts also embrace
habeas corpus more than others––the writ has appeared many times on behalf of
parties like children, slaves or the mentally ill.
If all goes well in the
courtroom, Wise plans that once an NhRP client has been freed, the animal will
find a new home similar to its natural environment. Released chimpanzees would
relocate to a sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida called Save the Chimps. The
refuge has a large artificial lake and thirteen three to five acre islands, on
which around 25 chimpanzees live. Wise affirms that “That’s about the closest
[habitat] to an African environment we can find in the continent of North
America.”
“I think we treat them
as our slaves,” Wise says of humans’ relationship with animals. “Nonhuman
animals are extremely helpless...So [their] combination of being helpless and
lacking all potential for rights means that we can do whatever we want [to
them]. That’s a very potent combination––a very difficult one to reverse.”
Maybe Wise and the NhRP can reverse the irreversible.
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