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| May 21, 2002 | Tuesday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 8,1423 |
Animals have rights
By 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 non-human 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 bio-medical 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.
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.
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 US state — it wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar. So many human lawsuits are about comparatively frivolous things.
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.
Wise notes it took more than 2,000 years to change the way society viewed human slavery dating back to the enslavement of Persians by classical Greeks. But he is pleasantly surprised at how quickly his ideas are being talked about, and sometimes accepted.—Reuters
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