Although Steven Wise anchored his legal arguments in research, citing the work of scientists including primatologist Jane Goodal, he also drew parallels between animal captivity, enslavement and institutional misogyny. 'Courts once failed to recognize the rights of Black people and women', he argued; 'Animals, are similarly overlooked. It’s a form of speciesism, the idea that the group you are part of is superior in some qualitatively dramatic way to every other group'.
HARRISON SMITH: Steven M. Wise, a legal warrior for animal rights who argued that chimpanzees, elephants, whales and other highly intelligent creatures have a fundamental right to liberty, no less than the humans who often confined or killed them, died Feb. 15 at his home in Coral Springs, Fla. He was 73.
His wife, Gail Price-Wise, said the cause was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. Mr. Wise had been diagnosed with the disease almost three years ago, she said, and had continued to work with his Washington-based nonprofit, the Nonhuman Rights Project, through three brain surgeries and two rounds of chemotherapy.
An impassioned lawyer with wire-rimmed glasses and wispy salt-and-pepper hair, Mr. Wise practiced animal rights law beginning in the early 1980s, galvanized by Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s landmark book “Animal Liberation.” He defended scores of rowdy dogs, all slated to be put down because of barking or biting; argued against state-sponsored deer hunts; and advocated for a dolphin named Rainbow, who was supposed to be moved from Boston’s New England Aquarium to a Navy facility for military training before Mr. Wise filed a lawsuit and rallied public opinion against the transfer…
Mr. Wise became an incisive and oft-quoted spokesman for animal law. He served as president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund from 1985 to 1995; taught one of the country’s first animal law courses at Vermont Law School in 1990; lectured at universities including Harvard and Stanford; and was featured in a 2016 documentary, “Unlocking the Cage,” directed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker. He also wrote books including “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals” (2000), which Goodall praised as “the animals’ Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, and Universal Declaration of Human Rights all in one.”…
Early in his career, he recalled, colleagues and courtroom observers mocked the arguments he delivered on behalf of a captive African gray parrot or a short-tempered St. Bernard. But as attitudes toward animals softened in recent years, Mr. Wise came to embody a potentially paradigm-shifting approach to animal law.
Through the Nonhuman Rights Project, which he founded in 1995, he campaigned to secure legal rights for animals, seeking to transform a court system that had long considered animals scarcely different from inanimate objects.
“Steve was enormously innovative in helping a generation of lawyers see that, despite the ways in which nonhuman animals differ from humans, we have more than enough in common to remove the blinders that have too long obscured the capabilities and moral claims that sentient beings other than human persons share with the rest of us,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a legal scholar and Harvard University professor emeritus…
Mr. Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project, or NhRP, focused on three groups of animal clients, drawing on cognitive and behavioral research while arguing that each group is self-aware, autonomous and cognitively sophisticated, thus deserving of fundamental rights: elephants, great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans) and cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises).
Although he sought to anchor his arguments in research, citing the work of scientists including British primatologist Jane Goodall, an NhRP board member, Mr. Wise also drew parallels between animal captivity, enslavement and institutional misogyny. Courts once failed to recognize the rights of Black people and women; animals, he argued, were similarly overlooked.
“It’s a form of speciesism — the idea that the group you are part of is superior in some qualitatively dramatic way to every other group,” he told Newsday in 2000. “It’s something we humans have played out with each other. Europeans vs. Africans. White vs. Black. Men vs. women. Adults vs. children. Nazis vs. Jews. Long histories of different groups of people believing that other groups of people were not worthy of rights, were not worthy of respect, were not worthy of dignity, were not worthy of consideration”. SOURCE…
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