Steven Wise: A Revolutionary

Are We Ready To Accept Animals as Equals?
As Steven Wise's NonHuman Rights Project takes the world by storm, 
soon we will need to be.

Steven M. Wise, founder of the Nonhuman Rights project, is a revolutionary. His organization is the first of its kind to seek to grant chimpanzees “legal personhood” in the state of New York. Wise has had a successful career in animal rights law, and is now making history. His name may gain prominence in the history books as the first man to give animals equal rights.

Wise is a law scholar who specializes in animal protection issues, primatology, and animal intelligence. He has taught  animal rights law at Harvard Law School, Vermont Law School, John Marshall Law School, Lewis & Clark Law School, and Tufts University school of Veterinary Medicine. He was also a keynote speaker at events like TEDx, where he continues to tell the story of the Nonhuman Rights Project. Wise agreed to do a phone interview with Earthscope Media while he was attending a conference in Oregon. As he told us a history of the organization, the specific legal work they have done, and his court arguments, Wise spoke with a strong, eloquent voice.

The Nonhuman Rights Project began in 2007, when after giving years to animal rights law, Wise realized that animals weren’t granted their rights because of a structural problem. In order for animals to have clear rights, they needed to be seen as people in the eyes of the law. With this idea, he started the Nonhuman Rights Project to fight for  “legal personhood” granted to animals who are autonomous. An autonomous being is a being that has self-determination. The Nonhuman Rights Project is working with chimpanzees, elephants, birds, and dolphins. Wise and his team decided to begin with the chimpanzee, who have very similar neurological abilities to the human species.

Chimpanzees are autonomous creatures that can do mathematics, paint, communicate effectively and live with a similar routine to the human life. Wise and his team chose four chimpanzees, Kiko,Tommy, Hercules and Leo to represent in court. Kiko is a privately owned chimpanzee who was kept in a cage in the Niagara Falls; Tommy is also a privately owned chimpanzee who lived in a cage on the edge of at trailer park in Gloversville, NY; and Hercules and Leo were two chimps were being used for locomotive research at the Anatomy Department at Stony Brook University. Wise believes that in order for these chimpanzees to be given rights and freed from their living conditions, they needed to be granted “legal personhood”. If not granted legal personhood, an animal is “invisible” in the eyes of the law.

According to Wise, It took seven years for him and his team to find habeaus corpus, a claim that was used in the 1772 case Somerset vs Stewart. In this case, Slave James Somerset was freed after William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield and the chief justice of the English Court of King’s Bench argued with habeas corpus. For his case, Wise followed the common law of Article 70 of habeaus corpus for their claim to the New York Judges.

Wise also meditated on his collaboration with other animal welfare organizations. In 2011, PETA took SeaWorld to court, fighting for the rights of their dolphins, using the 13th amendment to argue that these animals were slaves. Wise agreed they are slaves, but him and his team knew the case would not pass and appealed to be friends of the court. By doing this, they prevented harm to their future arguments. Since then, they have not encountered any similar cases, but they expect some more in the future. Wise hopes that future cases will have defendants who have carefully educated themselves on animal rights appeals and habeaus corpus. In order for a case to be successful, Wise argues that the defendants have to fully understand all of the complexities of habeaus corpus. He also says that he hopes there will be a collaboration between Nonhuman Rights project and the defendants for these kinds of cases in the future.

Right now, Nonhuman Rights project is working with organizations in seven other countries. They are working with people in England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia. These cases are in a different legal system with different complexities than those in the United States. With a variety of cases, Wise is currently working with these organizations to prepare strong, thorough arguments. No organization has yet to file a suit. This leaves Wise relieved, as he says that an argument claiming legal personhood takes a lot of time to understand the complexity.

On the differences in culture, Wise commented that currently governments grant animal rights. He says he hopes that his lawsuits in New York will change that, as well as the future law suits the Nonhuman Rights project are currently planning. Wise spoke enthusiastically on a future case in another state that defends the rights of elephants. He also mentioned that in another year, they will be filing a lawsuit in a third state. He comments that the process may take longer, as the team has to find new arguments and a new cause of action. Wise believes that animals other than chimpanzees, like dolphins, whales and elephants, are conscious beings and should also be granted legal personhood.

On July 30th, New York County Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe released a 33 page decision in which she said “for now” she is going to deny Hercules and Leo “legal personhood”, citing the decision to deny “legal personhood” from an appellate court who denied Tommy’s case last year. Tommy’s case is pending a request to review before the New York Court of Appeals. But Wise is keeping a positive outlook. He said that he feels it will take less time for the United States’ public to accept animals as beings with legal personhood than it did when women and slaves were granted the same rights. Wise commented that the similarity of the chimpanzees’ cognitive power and the climbing heap of scientific evidence will help to convince the public. With Wises’ enthusiasm, ambition and eloquence, animal “personhood” can’t be far off. In order to learn more about the Nonhuman Rights project, visit http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/.

Izzy Snow, Earthscope Media Intern, July 30th 2015