FEATURE - Animals have rights too, says legal eagle
Date: 20-May-02
Country: USA
Author: Jill Serjeant
But then he realized that it wasn't enough to save the lives of a few hundred dogs, an occasional deer, or the odd ape. So he set about the ambitious task of trying to change the law so that entire species - notably dolphins, chimpanzees and gorillas - could be granted basic legal rights.
Wise is not a loony liberal with a menagerie of chickens, chimps and cats liberated from fates worse than death in some battery farm, zoo or medical research laboratory - although he sees such facilities as places of slavery and torture.
He regards as "entirely silly" the widely ridiculed refusal by the Washington Zoo to release the medical records of a dead giraffe on the grounds it would violate the giraffe's privacy rights.
Wise moreover is "not really a be-kind-to-animals sort of person", but a suit-wearing lawyer and Harvard professor whose arguments are based on the principles of justice and respect.
"It's not really a matter of trying to gain rights for nonhuman animals because I love them, but because I respect them and I believe others should respect them as well.
"My purpose is ... to take the values and principles that lie at the center of our system of justice and point out that they are applicable not only to human beings, but to some nonhuman beings as well," Wise told Reuters in an interview.
FREEDOM AT LAST
In "Drawing the Line," Wise presses the legal and scientific case for extending basic rights of freedom from slavery and torture to chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas and Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins.
Basing his arguments on well-documented studies of their mental powers, emotional bonds, social skills, language and self-awareness, Wise says there is also increasing evidence to suggest that African elephants, African Gray parrots, honeybees and dogs may merit such legal rights.
In an age when it would be unthinkable to use newborn human babies, the profoundly senile, or the insane for biomedical research or display them for public entertainment, Wise asks why dolphins, chimps or elephants - some of whom are more sophisticated than tiny infants - should have to endure such indignities.
"There are some nonhuman animals who obviously have such complex minds and such strong personalities that they are indeed like our children, and they deserve to be treated with respect," said Wise, who has four-year old twins.
Animals are currently regarded under most Western law as property. But granting these eight species personhood would mean: "You could not use them in any way that you could not use my 4-year-old son. You couldn't eat them, kidnap them off the street and put them in a cage, do biomedical research on them, or exhibit them for profit in a zoo."
As if Wise's presentation of the scientific evidence was not enough, he uses the controversial analogy of the human slave trade to press home the ethical case.
"Human slavery was made possible by the rule that humans could be legal things, a concept that seems so wrong today but which was woven into the societies of its day," writes Wise.
"As legal things, nonhuman animals are treated today as human slaves were treated once and continue to be treated in those few places in which human slavery is unlawfully practiced."
RATTLING THE CAGE
Wise dismisses as a "bogus argument" the contention that, in his ideal world, the courts would be flooded with lawsuits brought by lonely elephants, performing dolphins and tortured apes.
"Say it led to 100 lawsuits - two in each U.S. state - it wouldn't even be a blip on the radar. So many human lawsuits are about comparatively frivolous things.
"What we are talking about would be truly life and death decisions - should this being live or die, should this being be tortured or suffer terrible pain?" he said.
Wise says he is "prepared to accept" that using chimpanzees in medical research, because of their similarities to humans, would help advance the fight against human disease.
"But it would
