Steven Wise’s TED Talk Transcript:
Chimps have feelings and thoughts. They
should also have rights
0:11 I'd like to have you look at this pencil. It's a thing. It's a legal thing. And so are books you
might have or the cars you own. They're all legal things. The great apes that you'll see behind
me, they too are legal things.
0:30 Now, I can do that to a legal thing. I can do whatever I want to my book or my car. These
great apes, you'll see. The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison who wrote a
book called "James & Other Apes." And he tells in his book how every single one them, almost
every one of them, is an orphan who saw his mother and father die before his eyes. They're legal
things.
0:58 So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall that separates legal things from legal
persons. On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. They don't count in law. They don't
have any legal rights. They don't have the capacity for legal rights. They are the slaves. On the
other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. Legal persons are very visible to judges. They
count in law. They may have many rights. They have the capacity for an infinite number of
rights. And they're the masters. Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. All human
beings are legal persons.
1:39 But being human and being a legal person has never been, and is not today, synonymous
with a legal person. Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. On the one side, there have
been many human beings over the centuries who have been legal things. Slaves were legal
things. Women, children, were sometimes legal things. Indeed, a great deal of civil rights
struggle over the last centuries has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed these
human things through the wall and have them become legal persons.
2:19 But alas, that hole has closed up. Now, on the other side are legal persons, but they've never
only been limited to human beings. There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are
not even alive. In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. In
pre-independence India, a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, that a mosque was a
legal person. In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was
a legal person, and in 2012, just recently, there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of
New Zealand and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person who owned
its own riverbed.
3:04 Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980, when I had a full head of lush, brown hair, and
indeed I was moved by it, because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the
voiceless, defend the defenseless, and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the
trillions, billions of nonhuman animals are. And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer.
And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something that was literally impossible,
the reason being that all of my clients, all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend,
were legal things; they were invisible. It was not going to work, so I decided that the only thing
that was going to work was they had, at least some of them, had to also be moved through a hole
that we could open up again in that wall and begin feeding the appropriate nonhuman animals
through that hole onto the other side of being legal persons.
4:01 Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about truly animal rights,
about the idea of having legal personhood or legal rights for a nonhuman animal, and I knew it
was going to take a long time. And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years before
we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation, long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch
another hole through that wall. It turned out that I was pessimistic, that it only took 28.
4:37 So what we had to do in order to begin was not only to write law review articles and teach
classes, write books, but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts of how you
litigate that kind of case.
4:53 So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was, a legal
cause of action. And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use to put their arguments in
front of courts.
5:07 It turns out there's a very interesting case that had occurred almost 250 years ago in London
called Somerset vs. Stewart, whereby a black slave had used the legal system and had moved
from a legal thing to a legal person. I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book
about it.
5:25 James Somerset was an eight-year-old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa. He
survived the Middle Passage, and he was sold to a Scottish businessman named Charles Stewart
in Virginia. Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London, and after he got
there, James decided he was going to escape. And so one of the first things he did was to get
himself baptized, because he wanted to get a set of godparents, because to an 18th-century slave,
they knew that one of the major responsibilities of godfathers was to help you escape.
5:59 And so in the fall of 1771, James Somerset had a confrontation with Charles Stewart. We
don't know exactly what happened, but then James dropped out of sight. An enraged Charles
Stewart then hired slave catchers to canvass the city of London, find him, bring him not back to
Charles Stewart, but to a ship, the Ann and Mary, that was floating in London Harbour, and he
was chained to the deck, and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica where James was to be sold in
the slave markets and be doomed to the three to five years of life that a slave had harvesting
sugar cane in Jamaica. Well now James' godparents swung into action. They approached the
most powerful judge, Lord Mansfield, who was chief judge of the court of King's Bench, and
they demanded that he issue a common law writ of habeus corpus on behalf of James Somerset.
6:52 Now, the common law is the kind of law that English-speaking judges can make when
they're not cabined in by statutes or constitutions, and a writ of habeus corpus is called the Great
Writ, capital G, capital W, and it's meant to protect any of us who are detained against our will.
A writ of habeus corpus is issued. The detainer is required to bring the detainee in and give a
legally sufficient reason for depriving him of his bodily liberty.
7:20 Well, Lord Mansfield had to make a decision right off the bat, because if James Somerset
was a legal thing, he was not eligible for a writ of habeus corpus, only if he could be a legal
person. So Lord Mansfield decided that he would assume, without deciding, that James Somerset
was indeed a legal person, and he issued the writ of habeus corpus, and James's body was
brought in by the captain of the ship.
7:45 There were a series of hearings over the next six months. On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield
said that slavery was so odious, and he used the word "odious," that the common law would not
support it, and he ordered James free. At that moment, James Somerset underwent a legal
transubstantiation. The free man who walked out of the courtroom looked exactly like the slave
who had walked in, but as far as the law was concerned, they had nothing whatsoever in
common.
8:13 The next thing we did is that the Nonhuman Rights Project, which I founded, then began to
look at what kind of values and principles do we want to put before the judges? What values and
principles did they imbibe with their mother's milk, were they taught in law school, do they use
every day, do they believe with all their hearts -- and we chose liberty and equality.
8:33 Now, liberty right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because of how you're put
together, and a fundamental liberty right protects a fundamental interest. And the supreme
interest in the common law are the rights to autonomy and self-determination. So they are so
powerful that in a common law country, if you go to a hospital and you refuse life-saving
medical treatment, a judge will not order it forced upon you, because they will respect your selfdetermination and your autonomy.
9:08 Now, an equality right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because you resemble
someone else in a relevant way, and there's the rub, relevant way. So if you are that, then because
they have the right, you're like them, you're entitled to the right. Now, courts and legislatures
draw lines all the time. Some are included, some are excluded. But you have to, at the bare
minimum you must -- that line has to be a reasonable means to a legitimate end. The Nonhuman
Rights Project argues that drawing a line in order to enslave an autonomous and self-determining
being like you're seeing behind me, that that's a violation of equality.
9:50 We then searched through 80 jurisdictions, it took us seven years, to find the jurisdiction
where we wanted to begin filing our first suit. We chose the state of New York. Then we decided
upon who our plaintiffs are going to be. We decided upon chimpanzees, not just because Jane
Goodall was on our board of directors, but because they, Jane and others, have studied
chimpanzees intensively for decades. We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they
have, and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. And so we chose chimpanzees,
and we began to then canvass the world to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. We found
them in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, England and the United States, and amongst them,
they wrote 100 pages of affidavits in which they set out more than 40 ways in which their
complex cognitive capability, either individually or together, all added up to autonomy and selfdetermination.
10:46 Now, these included, for example, that they were conscious. But they're also conscious
that they're conscious. They know they have a mind. They know that others have minds. They
know they're individuals, and that they can live. They understand that they lived yesterday and
they will live tomorrow. They engage in mental time travel. They remember what happened
yesterday. They can anticipate tomorrow, which is why it's so terrible to imprison a chimpanzee,
especially alone. It's the thing that we do to our worst criminals, and we do that to chimpanzees
without even thinking about it.
11:18 They have some kind of moral capacity. When they play economic games with human
beings, they'll spontaneously make fair offers, even when they're not required to do so. They are
numerate. They understand numbers. They can do some simple math. They can engage in
language -- or to stay out of the language wars, they're involved in intentional and referential
communication in which they pay attention to the attitudes of those with whom they are
speaking. They have culture. They have a material culture, a social culture. They have a
symbolic culture. Scientists in the Taï Forests in the Ivory Coast found chimpanzees who were
using these rocks to smash open the incredibly hard hulls of nuts. It takes a long time to learn
how to do that, and they excavated the area and they found that this material culture, this way of
doing it, these rocks, had passed down for at least 4,300 years through 225 chimpanzee
generations.
12:15 So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. Our chimpanzee, first we found two of them in
the state of New York. Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. Then we
found Tommy. Tommy is a chimpanzee. You see him behind me. Tommy was a chimpanzee.
We found him in that cage. We found him in a small room that was filled with cages in a larger
warehouse structure on a used trailer lot in central New York. We found Kiko, who is partially
deaf. Kiko was in the back of a cement storefront in western Massachusetts. And we found
Hercules and Leo. They're two young male chimpanzees who are being used for biomedical,
anatomical research at Stony Brook. We found them.
12:59 And so on the last week of December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits
all across the state of New York using the same common law writ of habeus corpus argument
that had been used with James Somerset, and we demanded that the judges issue these common
law writs of habeus corpus. We wanted the chimpanzees out, and we wanted them brought to
Save the Chimps, a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida which involves an
artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands -- there are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees
live on each of them. And these chimpanzees would then live the life of a chimpanzee, with
other chimpanzees in an environment that was as close to Africa as possible.
13:42 Now, all these cases are still going on. We have not yet run into our Lord Mansfield. We
shall. We shall. This is a long-term strategic litigation campaign. We shall. And to quote
Winston Churchill, the way we view our cases is that they're not the end, they're not even the
beginning of the end, but they are perhaps the end of the beginning.
14:09 Thank you.
14:11 (Applause)
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_wise_chimps_have_feelings_and_thoughts_they_should_also_
have_rights/transcript?language=en