Lawyers representing two lab chimps “unlawfully detained” for biomedical experiments at Stony Brook University in New York are striving to have them freed under personhood status that gives them the rights of people.
Supreme Court justice Barbara Jaffe has agreed to hear the case which ethicist Peter Singer says could ultimately “narrow the gulf” between what it legally means now to be human or “just” an animal.
In a rare move last month, Judge Jaffe ordered the university currently holding the pair of young chimpanzees to show cause why Leo and Hercules shouldn’t be released from captivity, as animal rights petitioners are seeking.
The defendant’s attorneys have since asked for additional time to answer, and a public hearing has been calendared for May 27, 2015.
Singer et al contend that since personhood can be extended to corporations for the purposes of granting them the “unalienable rights” of individuals, then clearly the same benefits and privileges should be awarded Stony Brook’s helpless primates.
Accordingly, the research monkeys’ abusive detention would be patently unlawful, and constitute a false imprisonment under New York State’s existing civil statutes and penal codes.
But the Nonhuman Rights Project, the group suing for the pair’s immediate release, isn’t demanding anybody be criminally charged in the matter. “We are only asking for one legal right and that’s bodily liberty,” states the executive director of NhRP, Natalie Prosin.
To those ends, the organization is begging the court to allow Hercules and Leo to be moved to a sanctuary where their “social, emotional, and physical needs” are properly met, and where they may freely “exercise their autonomy and self-determination to the greatest degree possible.”
Indeed, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the gravamen of the organization’s unusual lawsuit, and what it compassionately seeks on behalf of other incarcerated creatures who obviously cannot defend their own liberty interests.
While the NhRP’s pending litigation is not the first of its kind, and could go the way of a previously failed bid to free Tommy the Chimp from his Gloversville NY prison, it nonetheless serves to steadily erode the misconception that animal captives are chattel whose owners can do with whatever they want.
Tommy’s earlier case may in fact bolster the current suit, in that the State’s highest court erroneously ruled the 26-year-old chimpanzee ineligible for personhood protections because “unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities, or be held legally accountable for their actions.”
Under any fair reading of that contradictory 7-page ruling which the Nonhuman Rights Project has appealed, neither a minor child nor a mentally impaired adult would qualify as persons either. So the justices’ decision to abandon Tommy to the whim of his jailers is a weak one, since the reasoning behind it is seriously flawed.
In a time when global climate change has now begun to pose large species with mass extinction, the success in establishing protective personhood status for threatened wildlife of every breed has never been more paramount -- for them and mankind as well.
Moreover, the more humanely we do treat our fellow nonhuman inhabitants, the more human we ourselves become.
