Steven Wise garnered a fair bit of attention in April when his new group,
The Chimpanzee Collaboratory, launched its campaign to grant chimpanzees
standing in U.S. courts. If successful, this would allow animal rights
activists to sue medical researchers, animal entertainers, zoos and other
entities for violating the rights of chimpanzees in their care.
Wise summed up his view in Nature writing,
I say that a minimum level of autonomy — the abilities to desire, to
act intentionally and to have some sense of self, whatever the species —
is sufficient to justify the basic legal right to bodily integrity.. . .
Such immunity rights as bodily integrity and freedom from slavery can
belong to human children, infants, the very retarded, the profoundly
senile and the insane.
And, of course, if a retarded child has a right not to be
experimented on, why not a chimpanzee?
This is old hat for Wise, but it was odd seeing Harvard Law professor
Laurence Tribe offering his support, however odd, to the Chimpanzee
Collaboratory. Unlike Wise, it wasn’t clear that Tribe had really thought
through his claims.
ABC News, for example, paraphrased Tribe as arguing that if a corporation
— which is certainly not a sentient entity — can have rights, can’t
animals? But this is an entirely specious argument since he only reason
that corporations have rights is that they are the results of the
collective action of rights holders.
The corporation known as The New York Times deserves to be protected by
the First Amendment, for example, because it is composed of individuals
each of whom also possess such rights.
The odd thing is that Tribe seems to have something entirely different in
mind than Wise. Tribe, for example, seems to think that granting legal
standing to chimpanzees would simply be a way to more vigorously enforce
existing animal cruelty laws rather than create legal rights for them.
Tribe claims, for example, chimpanzees that have legal standing could
nonetheless still be used for medical research.
And where is the Chimpanzee Collaboratory getting the money to pursue
this campaign? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes that Rob Glaser,
chief executive of RealNetworks Inc., has given $1 million in funding to
the group over the past two years.
Sources:
Should we let chimpanzees sue? ABCNews, May 2002.
U.S. activists demand lawyers for chimps. The BBC, April 26,
2002.
Will chimps make chumps of us in court? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
April 30, 2002.