Interview with animal rights lawyer Steven Wise!

[Guest guest]

Scott (NPR) talks to Steven Wise, an animal rights lawyer and author of

" Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights for Animals " . Wise argues that monkeys

and other primates feel complex emotions and therefore deserve some of the same

fundamental legal rights that humans enjoy.

 

Check it out!

 

http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/wesat/20000219.wesat.03.ram

 

 

For those of you who may not be familiar with Steven Wise and his book " Rattling

the Cage " , here are the deets:

 

BACKGROUND

For four thousand years, a legal stone wall has separated all human from all

non-human animals. On one side, even the most trivial interests of a species

ours are jealously guarded. We have assigned ourselves, alone amongst the

million animal species, the exalted status of legal persons, entitled to the

rights of personhood. On the other side of that wall lies the legal refuse of an

entire kingdom, not just chimpanzees and bonobos, but gorillas and orangutans,

monkeys, and dogs, elephants, and dolphins, legal things all. Their most basic

and fundamental interests their pains, their lives, their freedoms are

intentionally ignored, maliciously trampled, and routinely abused.

 

In RATTLING THE CAGE: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (A Merloyd Lawrence

Book/Perseus Books, February 8, 2000), animal rights activist and the country's

best-known animal lawyer (USA Today) Steven Wise, who also teaches animal rights

law at Harvard Law School, provides a brilliant and passionate discussion about

why basic legal rights should be extended to animals, beginning with chimpanzees

and bonobos.

 

Wise shows us how law has evolved to bring fundamental rights to the most

defenseless humans around the globe, but how it has yet to begin to evolve for

other species. Even a human lost in a permanent vegetative state enjoys a large

array of legal rights. But a chimpanzee in possession of a remarkable complex

and active mind has no rights at all.

 

RATTLING THE CAGE argues for the fundamental legal rights of bodily integrity

and bodily liberty for chimpanzees and bonobos and shows how similar these

creatures brains and genes are to our own. Wise peels away their mental layers

to show us what is known about how they feel and what they think. We learn how

they understand cause and effect, how they use and make tools, how they deceive,

empathize, count simple numbers and add fractions, treat their illnesses with

medicinal plants, communicate with symbols, understand English, use sign

language, and how they might know what others think.

 

In addition, Wise explains how our failure to recognize the basic legal rights

of such animals creates a glaring contradiction in our law that not only treats

them unjustly but undermines the foundation of human rights. Steven Wise has

worked and communicated with the world's most prominent primatologists, visited

many of their laboratories, and met the chimpanzees and bonobos whom they

observe. In a witty, moving, persuasive, and impeccably researched argument, he

demonstrates that, based on the latest scientific findings, the cognitive,

emotional, and social capacities of these apes entitle them to freedom from

imprisonment and abuse.

 

This path-breaking and exciting book has everything needed to convince judges,

scientists, lawyers, and the millions who simply care about animals of the

injustice of denying them basic legal rights.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Steven M. Wise, J.D., is a prominent litigator who teaches Animal Rights Law at

the Harvard, Vermont, and John Marshall Law Schools. His 20 years of courtroom

experience, scientific collaboration with well-known scientists, and eloquent

activism have made him, in the words of Roger Fouts, author of Next of Kin, the

perfect person to write this book.

 

 

RATTLING THE CAGE

Toward Legal Rights for Animals

by Steven M. Wise

ISBN: 0-7382-0065-4; $25.00; 332 pages; Hardcover

A Merloyd Lawrence Book/Perseus Books

Publication date: February 8, 2000

 

 

http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/wesat/20000219.wesat.03.ram

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