Future generations will rue the days when we treated animals as "property." Professor Steven M. Wise will be recalled among the righteous.
From The Washington Post:
Steven M. Wise, legal force for animal rights, dies at 73
He argued that autonomous, cognitively sophisticated animals such as whales, dolphins and chimps had fundamental legal rights
By Harrison Smith
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.
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.
In an email, Tribe added that Mr. Wise combined “compassion and empathy” with a creative approach to the law, especially through cases in which he sought to extend the legal principle of habeas corpus — which people can use to contest their illegal confinement — to elephants and other animals that sometimes face squalid living conditions in captivity.
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.”
Critics questioned his legal tactics as well as his broader aims, arguing that there were fundamental differences between humans and animals, and that his animal clients were better served through efforts to strengthen existing legislation.
But Mr. Wise noted that there was no law or statute preventing animals from being held in captivity altogether. Convinced that a rights-based approach was the only way forward, he turned to habeas corpus petitions, concluding that they offered a potential remedy for a “legal person,” not necessarily a human person. He cited myriad examples in which the law had recognized objects, institutions and even geographical features as “legal persons,” from a river in New Zealand to a collection of Hindu idols, and began working to reclassify animals as such.
Habeas corpus also offered him a way to see his cases tried in state court, the home of common law, instead of in federal court, where judges often consider themselves bound by the original intent of laws and statutes.
Mr. Wise put his legal strategy to the test in December 2013, filing habeas corpus petitions on behalf of four captive chimpanzees in New York. The first, Tommy, was being held in what Mr. Wise and the NhRP described as “a small, dank, cement cage in a cavernous dark shed” at a used-trailer lot near Gloversville, in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. The others were Kiko, in Niagara Falls, and Leo and Hercules, who were being kept at Stony Brook University on Long Island for a research study.
The petitions made national news. One by one, they also failed in court.
This time, the case reached the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. The judges ruled against Mr. Wise and his colleagues, 5-2, in June 2022, finding that habeas corpus was not intended to secure the rights of “nonhuman animals.”
Still, Mr. Wise found hope in the dissenting opinions, which seemed to suggest his argument was gaining ground. In one, Judge Rowan D. Wilson said the court had a duty “to recognize Happy’s right to petition for her liberty not just because she is a wild animal who is not meant to be caged and displayed, but because the rights we confer on others define who we are as a society.”
Mr. Wise’s optimism seemed vindicated in September, when the small city of Ojai, Calif., passed what the NhRP calls the first U.S. legislation “to recognize the legal right of a nonhuman animal”: an ordinance, developed with and supported by the NhRP, that protects elephants’ right to “bodily liberty,” including through “freedom from forced confinement.”
The older of two sons, Steven Mark Wise was born in Baltimore on Dec. 19, 1950, and grew up in Aberdeen, Md. His father worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a weapons testing and development center for the Army, and his mother was a homemaker.
Mr. Wise traced his interest in animal welfare back to childhood, when he and his family went to a farmers market once a month. One of the vendors sold chickens housed in small cages that horrified Mr. Wise, who wrote a letter to a state representative to complain about the birds’ living conditions.
“The representative wrote back,” the New Yorker reported in a 2023 feature about Mr. Wise’s legal crusade, “but nothing changed for the chickens.”
At the College of William & Mary in Virginia, Mr. Wise studied chemistry, deciding that he might want to become a doctor, and got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1972, found that his grades weren’t good enough for medical school and decided that given his interest in antiwar activism and social justice, law might be a better career path anyway. In 1976, he graduated from Boston University’s law school.
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.”
His marriages to Mary Lou Masterpole, a social worker, and Debra Slater, his longtime legal partner, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife of 20 years, NhRP board member Gail Price-Wise, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Roma Augusta; two children from his second, Siena and Christopher Wise; a stepdaughter, Mariana Price; and a brother.
Mr. Wise said he was undaunted by his defeats in the courtroom, and even came to expect them early in his career. “If we lose, we keep doing it again and again, until we find a judge who doesn’t feel that the way is closed off,” he told the New York Times in 2014. “Then our job is to produce the facts that will allow that judge to make that leap of faith. And when it happens, it will be huge. I wouldn’t be spending my life on this otherwise.”
From Sun Sentinel:
Steven Wise, Coral Springs animal advocate of international renown, dies at 73
Steven Wise, a Coral Springs lawyer who achieved worldwide fame for his work to free animals from laboratories and zoos, has died of cancer. He was 73.
Wise, who started out as a trial lawyer, brought landmark cases on behalf of captive chimpanzees, elephants and other animals. He founded the Nonhuman Rights Project, which works to establish the principle that animals have legal rights. Although his cutting-edge theories rarely prevailed in court, his lawsuits, books and teaching led judges, scholars and elected officials to take seriously the idea that animals had interests of their own, beyond their status as the property of human beings.
“Steve’s dedication, intelligence and hard work has made the legal recognition of the personhood of nonhuman animals a real possibility in the not-too-distant future,” wrote the philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, on Wise’s online memorial. “Sad as it is that he is no longer with us, we have the satisfaction of knowing that he used his life well.”
He brought one notable case on behalf of Happy, an elephant kept at the Bronx Zoo. Although he lost in the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, the case was considered a landmark for having gotten so far in the legal system and for inspiring dissents from two court justices.
Wise pursued these lawsuits not simply in the service of some abstract legal argument but because he cared deeply about the animals shut up in laboratories and zoos, writing in detail about their cheerless lives in cells and cages. In his book Rattling the Cage, he wrote of a chimpanzee named Jerome, deliberately infected with HIV, chronically ill and confined to a windowless cell, living “bloated, depressed, sapped,” who “had not played in fresh air for 11 years.”
Born in 1950, Wise attended the College of William and Mary, where he became involved in the movement to stop the Vietnam War, then studied law at Boston University. After reading Singer’s book Animal Liberation, the landmark text of the animal rights movement, he began to find ways to help animals in court. From 1985 to 1995, Wise served as president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. He then founded the Nonhuman Rights Project, which brought cases on behalf of captive animals.
“Steve inspired us every day with his relentlessly cheerful determination in the face of any and all obstacles, his fearlessness, his utter clarity on the injustices nonhuman animals endure, and his vision for a world where nonhuman rights are recognized alongside human rights,” the Nonhuman Rights Project said in a statement. “Steve spent almost every waking hour for the last four decades thinking about the struggle for nonhuman rights. Among lawyers and legal scholars, he was one of the greats — a true visionary, pursuing fundamental change with an awe-inspiring breadth of knowledge of law, history, science, and social justice.
Thanks to his work, this trial lawyer from suburban Fort Lauderdale achieved notable academic prominence. He taught the first animal law course offered at Harvard Law School and went on to teach at other leading law schools, including those at the University of Miami, the University of Michigan and Stanford University.
He wrote four books, laying out both the abstract arguments for his views and showing in graphic detail the suffering of the animals he was trying to free. His books include “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals,” “Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights,” “Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery,” and “An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominion Along the Banks of the Cape Fear River.”
Wise is survived by his wife, Gail Price-Wise, his children, Roma Augusta and her husband Michael Augusta, Siena Wise, Christopher Wise, his step-daughter, Mariana Price, his brother, Robert Wise, and his canine companion, Yogi, according to a news release from the Nonhuman Rights Project.
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