Steven Wise: The Nonhuman Rights Project
Sandie Sedgbeer: And it’s great that you have the citizen action toolkits because you’re making it so easy for people to be able to support you.
Steven Wise: There are certainly a million ways of being able to change the world. And one of them is through litigation, and others are through politics. And we try to work with people so they can help raise people’s consciousness.
Sandie Sedgbeer: When you first started out, it said that people used to bark at you in the courtroom, presumably colleagues, members of the public, I don’t know. What happens when you enter a courtroom now?
Steven Wise: We’re treated with an enormous amount of respect now. The difference in the last 30 years is just extraordinary. If you bring yourself back to 1980, when I started this, nobody ever thought about what we do. No one ever heard really of even the idea of animal rights or animal protection. The idea of lawyers coming in and demanding that courts protect nonhuman animals was just something that no one had ever thought about.
I teach in Barcelona in the masters’ degree and animal law program at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, those students go out into the EU, go out into Europe and begin bringing that kind of knowledge to bear on the work in all kinds of departments, within Europe.
Sandie Sedgbeer: How far away do you think you are from, winning?
Steven Wise: Well, it depends on how you define winning. It’d be like saying, well, how far are you from getting civil rights for humans? But, once it starts happening, then the dam is going to burst.
And the reason it’s going to burst then is that our arguments are in harmony with how–what judges say they believe in. The arguments that we’re making for justice for nonhuman animals are the same ones for humans.
And so, eventually, they’re going to get it, and they’re going to realize that, by ruling against us, they’re actually undermining justice for humans, as well.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Steven Wise, on behalf of everybody who cares about animal welfare, nonhuman animal rights, thank you.
To Learn More about Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project
For more information about how you can bring the moving Unlocking the Cage to your town or raise awareness of the world’s first elephant rights lawsuit and support the work of the Nonhuman Rights Project, visit www.nonhumanrights.org.
I’m Sandie Sedgbeer. And if you’d like to be among the first to know about future guests and shows, you can sign up for my newsletter at sedgbeer.com
