20th
On December 19, 1994, animal protection lawyer Steven Wise — a deeply patient man — was frustrated. A decade into his 25-year plan to upend the fundamental legal principle that animals are property or “things” with no more rights than a table or bicycle, he was barely making a dent.
Wise’s passion for animal rights dates to 1979 when reading philosopher Peter Singer’s landmark book Animal Liberation proved both revelation and rude awakening. “I really felt that I could not really un-ring that bell,” he says. “There was more injustice there to be fought than any I could think of anywhere in the universe.”
Wise had found his calling. His grand ambition is for nothing short of a legal revolution. He wants to systematically overturn more than 2,000 years of law by winning basic common law rights for other sentient beings we now know suffer, feel fear, have complex emotions, and possess sometimes startling levels of intelligence. Welfare laws notwithstanding, unless they are “legal persons,” to Wise they have no rights at all in the eyes of the law and therefore their lives don’t count.
He had no illusions that change could come any way but slowly. “I realized this wasn’t like a 1930s Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland thing where they say, ‘Hey! Let’s put on a show!” But on that watershed day in December — his 44th birthday — he had an epiphany.
“I woke up and said this is not going fast enough,” he recalls, “and if I’m going to be pivotal in gaining legal rights for nonhuman animals — which I thought I was, and I think I will be — I’d better get moving.”
He walked away from his comfortable 18-year law partnership and founded The Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, the world’s first nonprofit dedicated to achieving legal rights for nonhuman primates, and later the Nonhuman Rights Project.
In 2000, primate researcher Jane Goodall, who wrote the foreword, called his book, titled Rattling the Cage, “the animals’ Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and Universal Declaration of Rights all in one.” The Yale Law Journal dubbed him a “piston” of the animal rights movement.
Wise subscribes to Darwin’s belief that any sharp dichotomy between human beings and other animals cannot survive a basic understanding of evolution.
It’s what legal scholar David Favre, a professor at Michigan State University College of Law and editor-in-chief of the Animal Legal & Historical Web Center, calls the culture of, “How special are we humans? Do we deserve a place of the gods in which we simply use everything else on the planet?”
