Richard Drew/AP Nonhuman Rights Project president Steven Wise, seen at court in May, said the group is “looking forward to promptly appealing Justice Jaffe’s thoughtful and comprehensive decision” after the judge ruled Thursday that chimps are not “persons”.
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The organization claimed that due to chimps’ high intelligent, sentient nature, they should be considered “nonhuman persons’ and granted the right to freedom”.
The case for the Stony Brook university had been argued by the office of the state attorney general, Mr Eric Schneiderman, which filed briefs that characterised the suit as “a radical attempt to blur the legal boundaries that exist between humans and animals”, and suggested that giving chimps habeas corpus rights could lead to legal chaos and animals on the loose.
“They’re in cages. They’re by themselves”.
In contrast, she said, “persons” are defined as those who have “rights, duties and obligations that things do not”.
“Animals, including chimpanzees and other highly intelligent mammals, are considered as property under the law”.
The judge wrote that someday they may get legal rights, but that courts don’t embrace change quickly. By granting the writ, the judges would have implicitly acknowledged that chimpanzees were legal people too – a first step in freeing them. She also states that the concept of legal personhood continues to evolve: “Not very long ago, only Caucasian male, property-owning citizens were entitled to the full panoply of legal rights under the United States Constitution”. But she indicated that she sympathized with Hercules, Leo and their supporters.
But those past mistreatments of humans are not analogous to the circumstances of chimps, she wrote. They don’t have any adults around.
“The similarities between chimpanzees and humans inspire the empathy felt for a beloved pet”, Jaffee conceded.
Judge Barbara Jaffe said that the group’s efforts on behalf of chimps are “understandable” and “some day they might even succeed”, the New York Law Journal reported.
A spokeswoman for Stony Brook said that the chimps wouldn’t be used for any more research at the university and that it had nothing to do with Thursday’s court ruling. His group has filed similar cases in Fulton and Niagara counties; the Suffolk case was summarily dismissed.
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However, the decision against the Nonhuman Rights Project might leave the door open for future arguments to extend rights to the primates.
