Steven Wise, animal rights champion, has died at the age of 73

Steven M. Wise, a pioneering animal rights attorney who gave a voice to clients unable to testify on their behalf and demanded the same moral and legal rights as their owners, caretakers and caretakers, died on February 15 at his home in Coral Springs, Fla. He was 73.

The cause was complications from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, said his child Siena Wise.

Like John Scopes, the Tennessee evolution teacher at the center of the so-called monkey trial nine decades earlier, Mr. Wise his legal battle – in his case he sought not to upgrade animals as our direct antecedents in the human family tree, but to recognize their personhood as cognitive, emotional and social beings who have the same moral and legal right to freedom as humans. (Unlike Mr. Wise, John Scopes won on appeal.)

M. Wise was the first president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the founder and president of the Non-human rights project. He also taught courses on animal rights at Harvard and other law schools.

He wrote several books, including Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (2000), which legal scholar Cass R, Sunstein, in a New York Times review, called “a passionate, fascinating and in many ways startling book.” ; “Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights” (2002); “Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery” (2005), a bestseller about an English case that established that a slave was a person with legal rights; and “An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Rule on the Banks of the Cape Fear River” (2009).

In 2013, after decades of legal and scholarly research, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a groundbreaking habeas corpus writ, requiring authorities to bring a detainee to justice. However, the petition was not for a human, but for Tommy, a chimpanzee who was kept in a shed in a used trailer parking lot in Gloversville, New York, by a man who said he saved him from an even worse place.

Previously, advocates had expanded the definition of animal welfare (as opposed to animal rights) to include the treatment of animals in scientific research and animal husbandry. Comparing legal attitudes towards animals to human slavery before the Civil War, Mr Wise said animal rights laws would provide more protection than anti-cruelty statues against, for example, state-sponsored deer hunts and the Navy's use of dolphins for life-threatening tasks. .

“Certain species are capable of complex emotions, can communicate using language and have a sense of self,” Mr. Wise said in a 2005 lecture, “all traits that once defined humanity.”

“I see no difference,” he added, “between a chimpanzee and my four-year-old son.”

After defeat in a lower court, Mr. Wise told an Appellate Division panel in Albany, New York, that Tommy “can understand the past, anticipate the future, and that he suffers in solitary confinement as much as any human being.”

Mr. Wise did not propose a “Planet of the Apes” scenario, nor did he suggest that animals be given the right to vote; he previously proposed what he called “physical freedom” at one of the eight sanctuaries of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance.

In an interview with the nonprofit My dreams for animalshe defined bodily freedom this way: “Our business is not about whether they are treated well or badly in captivity – it is about whether they should be held in captivity at all.”

But the appeals court ruled unanimously against the idea that Tommy the chimpanzee would be given legal status as a person, similar to the protections afforded to corporations, saying that chimpanzees “unlike humans cannot fulfill any legal duty, may be subject to social responsibilities or may be held legally liable for their actions.”

“In our view,” the court said, “it is this inability to shoulder any legal responsibilities and social duties that makes it inappropriate to grant legal rights to chimpanzees.”

Around the same time, habeas corpus petitions filed by the Nonhuman Rights Project on behalf of three other chimpanzees in New York State also lost in court, although Stony Brook University returned the animal it studied to the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana.

Tommy was featured in 'Unlocking the Cage', a 2016 documentary about the Nonhuman Rights Project, directed by Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker. According to some sources, he also appeared alongside Matthew Broderick in the 1987 film 'Project

Mr. Wise suggested that eight other species could deserve the same rights as chimpanzees: gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, African gray parrots, dogs, honey bees and African elephants (including one at the Bronx Zoo, whose legal status his organization has challenged without success).

He cited a test conducted on great apes whose faces were smeared with a red dot. When they looked in the mirror, they reached for the dot on their face, not the reflection, which indicated a sense of self-worth.

The idea of ​​non-human animal rights has alarmed numerous legal scholars, including Richard A. Posner, a former federal judge who taught at the University of Chicago.

“If we fail to maintain a clear boundary between animals and humans,” Mr. Posner once said: “It could be that we treat people as badly as we treat animals.”

Other scholars disagree. Laurence H. Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said in an email that Mr. Wise “will be remembered far beyond our time as one of the most far-sighted and influential pioneers in the history of animal rights and welfare.”

“Steve's writing style, litigation strategy and organizational energy have taken our efforts to protect non-human animals from unspeakable abuses to a new and promising level,” added Professor Tribe.

Martha C. Nussbaum, a philosopher and professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, said of Mr. Wise that she “disagreed with his theoretical approach but respected him greatly and supported his practical efforts.” So far, Professor Nussbaum said by email, these efforts on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants have “convinced only dissenting judges, but that is the first step toward convincing a majority.”

Steven Mark Wise was born in Baltimore on December 19, 1950, the son of Selma (Rosen) Wise, who managed the household, and Sidney Wise, a NATO advisor.

He received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1972. His involvement in the anti-war movement on campus raised concerns about social justice and led him to study law at Boston University, where he received a degree in 1976.

In 1980, after a friend gave him a copy of “Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals” (1975), by Australian philosopher Peter Singer, Mr. Wise went from being an unfulfilled personal injury and criminal lawyer to an ardent animal rights crusader.

He initially defended individual animals, including dogs sentenced to death for attacking humans, and served as chairman of the Animal Legal Defense Fund from 1985 to 1995. He then founded the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, which became known as the Nonhuman Rights Project. .

In addition to Siena Wise, his child from his marriage to Debra Slater, which ended in divorce, Mr. Wise is survived by his wife, Gail Price-Wise; a daughter, Roma Augusta, from his first marriage to Marylou Masterpole, which also ended in divorce; a son, Christopher, from his marriage to Mrs. Slater; and a brother, Robert. He is also survived by Yogi, a Yorkshire terrier-Maltese mix, who he described as his canine companion.

(Tommy, the chimpanzee, is said to have died in a Michigan zoo in 2022.)

Given his upbringing, Mr. Wise was an unlikely advocate for animal rights. He remembered that his mother “always served meat at meals” and wore a mink coat. He had dogs and goldfish as pets, he said, but as for his relationship with other animals, “I never really interacted with them, except for eating them.”

But by the time he was 11, he was so appalled by the way chickens were crammed into cages at a farmers market that he wrote to a state lawmaker to complain. He later became a vegetarian and stopped wearing leather.

“I try to respect non-human animals,” he told The Times in 2002. “I don't eat them. I don't wear them. I try to avoid being involved in its abuse. But you do grow up with certain things. Sometimes I walk down the street and smell roast beef; I will feel attraction and repulsion at the same time.”