Are Chimps People Too?

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.

“Animal protection laws don't protect anyone very well,” Wise said. “The Nonhuman Rights Project is focusing on the legal personhood of chimpanzees between the context of the common law writ of habeas corpus...When they are being detained, we want to invoke a common law writ of habeas corpus on their behalf and be able to free them from their 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.   

To learn more about the Nonhuman Rights Project, go to http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/