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Steven Wise: The Nonhuman Rights Project

Steven Wise: The Nonhuman Rights Project

Steven Wise OMTimes

In December 2013, Animal Rights lawyer Steven Wise showed the world how an animal can transition from a thing without rights to a person with legal protections when he filed on behalf of four captive chimpanzees in New York State, the first ever lawsuit demanding person rights for animals. The Founder and President of the Nonhuman Rights Project, Steven Wise has spent decades fighting to ensure the well being and humane treatment of all animals. His lawsuits and the movie Unlocking the Cage herald a monumental shift in our culture as the public and judicial system show increasing receptiveness to his impassioned arguments. If successful, Steven Wise and his team could forever alter how animals in and out of captivity are regarded and treated.

Steven Wise joins us to share some of the harrowing stories behind the headlines and explain why animals should be protected from abuse in all the same ways that humans are.

Publisher’s Note:  The full audio interview between Steven Wise and Sandie Sedgbeer, host of What Is Going OM will be aired on OMTimes Radio.

An Interview with Steven Wise: Nonhuman Rights Project

 

Sandie Sedgbeer: Steven, you began your mission to gain rights for nonhuman animals in 1985, so a long time ago. What prompted that decision? Have you always been interested in animal rights?

Steven Wise: I got interested in animal protection issues in 1980 when I read a book by the philosopher Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, in which he talked about how we treated nonhuman animals, how badly we treated them and how many were affected by our treatment, billions of them. And I realized when I was reading the book that there didn’t appear to be any lawyers who were standing up in the interest of nonhuman animals. So, that was in 1980.

I then worked as a lawyer with the Animal Legal Defense Fund till 1985, and I became its President. And, over those five years, as we were beginning to bring lawsuits, I realized that there was a serious problem. Not all nonhuman animals had always been and were still being treated as legal things, which meant that they lacked the capacity for any sort of rights at all. They were, essentially, the slaves of persons, and persons–at least most persons are human beings.



And so, I realized that the only way in which the most, even the most fundamental interest in nonhuman animals could ever be protected would be if they were persons, which meant if they had the capacity for any legal rights. And so, in 1985, I decided that that’s what I would spend really the rest of my life doing is trying to get legal personhood for nonhuman animals.

And I realized that they had never had personhood. And for 2,000 years, they had been legal things. And I also knew that many human beings had been legal things, as well, we had all slowly become legal persons.

And at that point, I thought it would take about 30 years of preparation before we’d be able to file the first lawsuits that had a reasonable chance of success. And indeed, I was a little bit pessimistic. It only took 28 years, 2013, instead of 2015.

Sandie Sedgbeer: That’s quite a commitment that you undertook there, knowing that it was gonna take three decades to do this.

Steven Wise: Yes, and I knew it would because if you go back to 1985, there is no real animal rights movement. People don’t think about animal rights. There are no law books. There’s no one teaching any classes. There are no law review articles. There are no organizations. So, I realized that we’re just gonna have to start teaching classes in law schools, which I began to do. And since then, I’ve taught at seven law schools, including Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School.

I realized that we’d have to write law review articles, and I’ve written 22 of them. Books, I’ve written four of them. We’d have to have organizations. The one I began was the Nonhuman Rights Project. And we’d also have to wait for all the people working in this area to help make the world turn to a point where it would begin to become receptive to the kinds of arguments I wanted to make. So, I knew it was gonna take a long time and a lot of hard work, and it finally happened, and in 2013, we were ready to go, and the world was ready to hear it.



Sandie Sedgbeer: To put this into context for me, how long is it since the courts have seen corporations as humans?

Steven Wise: Well, the courts have viewed corporations as persons, but there’s a difference between being a person and being human. So, a human is a taxonomic, a biological term. A person is simply a legal term of art that says it’s an entity who has the capacity for any sort of a legal right.

So, for example, in the last year, New Zealand has made a river, the Wanganui River, and two national parks persons. And so, the river and the national parks, have the same rights as you and I might have as persons. They can sue or be sued. There are certain things you can do to them, you can’t do to them, certain things that the parks and the river can do to you. In India, India has made a mosque a person, a Hindu idol a person, the Holy Books of the Sikh Religion, a person. And of course, in Argentina now, as of November 2016, a chimpanzee named Cecilia has been made a nonhuman person.

So, a person is a term of art meaning that you have the capacity for the legal right as opposed to a thing, which means that you don’t have the capacity for any kind of legal right. And being a human and being a person are not synonymous. So, as you can see, there are many nonhumans or even nonliving entities that have been persons, and there have even been many human beings who have not been persons, who’ve been things – slaves, sometimes women and children, yes.

Sandie Sedgbeer: So, there is a precedent, you mentioned Cecilia; why not Tommy and Kiko and the other animals that you’re representing?

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Steven Wise: Well, we have been–we filed four–we have been filing lawsuits on behalf of those four chimpanzees in New York, and we also filed our first lawsuit on behalf of three elephants in the state of Connecticut, Minnie, Beulah, and Karen. And so, we’re beginning that fight there.



The way we litigate our cases is that, before we go into a jurisdiction, we look to see what the values and principles are that constitute judges as the judges themselves say it and their opinions. And we then form our legal arguments in the exact same terms.

So, we find that they value liberty and equality, autonomy, the idea that a being understands that she has a future that she can plan for, that can be a good or ill for her. And judges we’ve seen are very concerned in making sure that, right now at least, human beings, autonomous beings can live their lives as they choose autonomously.

They care about equality. They care about reasoned judicial decision making. They don’t want arbitrary decision making.

And so, we frame our arguments in those ways. We have won pieces of many lawsuits. We have not yet been able to put them all together. For example, we have gotten standing, I believe, six times. These are the first “people” in the world to claim that we were not being injured by that lawsuit, somebody else was the chimpanzees or the elephants. And we demanded that the court give us standing, the Nonhuman Rights Project, to file on their behalf even though they were the ones being injured and we weren’t. That had never been done before, so we succeeded there.

In 2015, we succeeded in, for the first time, having a judge issue a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, who were being held captive at Stony Brook University and is used for research. We forced Stony Brook University coming forward through that habeas corpus to be forced to justify why they thought that they could enslave the chimpanzee or keep them captive for many reasons.

We have not yet, like Cecilia, been able to persuade the court to then order them released and sent to a sanctuary. But, we feel that the courts are being pushed into a place where they have the choice of either following through and making their rulings adhere to the ideals of justice, of liberty and equality, reasoned decision making, autonomy that they normally use, or they can try to figure out some way of making all but only human beings persons and giving them rights. But, the problem is that that undermines their basic ideas of justice.

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