A Well-Lived Life: Steven M. Wise, Animal Rights Pioneer
A friend and former colleague, Steven Wise, a lifelong warrior for the rights of animals and founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, died last week. For many years, he taught at Vermont Law School (and has the sweatshirt to prove it, photo, above) and a few years ago, I had the privilege of introducing him at Bookstock, the annual literary festival in Woodstock, VT. Below are excerpts of an article I wrote in 2017 when I was a columnist for Vermont Woman; it’s a little longer than my usual posts, but Steve is worth getting to know.
Animal Advocate Steven Wise: Still Rattling the Cage by Susan B. Apel
In his TED talk, Steven Wise steps onto the stage, holding up a pencil in one hand. Behind him are outsized photographs, close up and majestic, of the faces of two chimpanzees. He describes the status of the pencil, saying, “It’s a thing, a legal thing.” Then he suddenly seizes it with both hands and snaps it in two.
Pointing to the photos, he continues, “The great apes you see behind me, they are legal things too.” Under the law, things—pencils, books, cars—are owned and used, kept or discarded at whim. With the brutal snap of the pencil still ringing in the listener’s memory, Wise is hoping to convince his audience that chimpanzees deserve better.
Wise is an attorney, activist, professor, and author who is described as “one of the pistons of the animal rights movement.” He has spent the last 30 years of his life working toward a single goal—to have certain nonhuman animals recognized as “persons” under the law. Unlike things, persons have rights. Wise wants animals to have them too. He has started with chimpanzees and is moving on to include elephants. Orcas are in the queue.
His choices of species are not random but rather supported by available scientific research. Jane Goodall is on the board of his Nonhuman Rights Project, but that is not why his campaign focuses on chimpanzees. According to Wise, chimps have been studied more than other animals, and those studies have shown them to have higher cognitive capacities than other species. They demonstrate memory, use tools, and have a social culture. They know the difference between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, which makes locking them up particularly cruel. A chimp understands confinement and is conscious that it is not just a temporary state. At a minimum, then, Wise is concentrating on certain groups of animals—demonstrably highly intelligent ones—and wants the law to afford them at least this single and most basic right: the right to bodily liberty. [Among others, his clients have included chimps who were being held in research labs and elephants caged in zoos. There is a photo of him at work with a poster that proclaims “We may be the only lawyers on earth whose clients are all innocent.”]
It is a long and uphill battle and one that Wise has been waging for decades. Wanting to speak for the “voiceless and defenseless,” he began as a lawyer who sought to protect animals from abuse. He quickly realized that his work was impossible. As long as animals were considered “things” under the law, there was little that the law could do. Wise shifted gears and began his mission to have nonhuman animals recognized as persons.
His proposition is a startling and, to some, a dubious one. He understands and explains it. “Human being” and “person” under the law have never been synonymous. Imagine a wall that divides two groups. On one side are persons who have rights; on the other side are things, like pencils and animals, that have no rights. In American jurisprudence, there used to be some human beings who were considered to be “things” and forced to dwell on that side of the wall: slaves, women, children. Over time, each of these groups—aided by activists, attorneys, and their own efforts—“punched a hole in the wall” and were pulled through to the other side.
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Wise also points out that there are a few nonhuman entities that have found a place on the person side of the wall. In the United States, corporations are persons. India’s supreme court granted personhood status to holy books of the Sikh religion, and in New Zealand, a river was so recognized. Wise’s point: maybe chimps are not such improbable candidates for personhood as they might first appear.
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Lawyers who devote themselves to civil rights causes such as this one are often patient people. As a young lawyer contemplating this endeavor, Wise estimated that it would take at least 30 years before it would be reasonable to expect courts to take him and his legal theory seriously. (He frequently comments that he was unduly pessimistic—it took only 28 years for the litigation to commence.) During that time, he wrote law review articles and books, including his first, Rattling the Cage. He gave speeches and appeared on televised debates (including a 2014 spot as a guest on The Colbert Report.) In 1990, he arrived at Vermont Law School to teach a seminar on animal rights jurisprudence, the first of its kind in the nation. He has consulted with individuals, groups and governments around the world. He has faced ridicule, recalling that when he walked into court to advocate for his nonhuman clients, those present would sometimes make barking noises.
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Wise’s story is dramatic enough to have found its way to the silver screen. Unlocking the Cage is a cinéma vérité–style documentary (Pennebaker Hegedus Films), recently screened at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. In one scene, a determined and Zen-serene Wise—admittedly grayer-haired than when his quest began—is entering the courtroom, hugging an overstuffed file to his chest. He says, “It’s a hell of a war, there’s going to be a lot of battles . . . But it’s time to begin.”
Steve is survived by his wife, Gail Price-Wise, his family, and his canine companion, Yogi.
For additional information on the Nonhuman Rights Project, click here. Steve’s full obituary appears here.
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word..