Government
Legal
Personhood for Animals
Advocates call for extending human rights to
animals.
by Clifton Coles
While many people think personal and legal rights are
reserved for human beings, a growing number have begun to argue that animals should have
more rights than simply being treated fairly and humanely. Leading the debate is law
professor Steven M. Wise, who argues that basic legal rights--freedom from slavery and
torture--should extend to certain species exhibiting awareness, cognizance, communication,
and other characteristics associated with being human. Some animals, including apes,
dolphins, and dogs, exhibit these skills at levels higher than or before young children,
who are granted rights at birth or before, Wise notes in his book Drawing the Line:
Science and the Case for Animal Rights.
These basic rights also extend to human beings displaying
no sense of self-awareness and yet are denied to animals that have learned to communicate
such as the gorilla Koko and the orangutan Chantek. Wise relates the story of a
10-month-old girl whose brain does little more than keep her basic functions going.
"On what nonarbitrary ground could a judge find the little girl has a common law
right to bodily integrity that forbids her use in terminal biomedical research, but that
[the gorilla] Koko shouldn't have that right, without violating basic notions of
equality?" he asks.
Wise rejects such speciesism--discrimination against
animals based on the assumption that humankind is superior. "Only a radical
speciesist would accept a baby girl who lacks consciousness, sentience, even a brain, as
having legal rights just because she's human, yet the thinkingest, talkingest, feelingest
apes have no rights at all, just because they're not human," he says.
Wise delineates four categories of practical autonomy,
which he defines as a being's ability to desire, an intention to fulfill that desire, and
a sense of self-awareness and self-sufficiency. Practical autonomy is the standard the law
uses as sufficient for basic legal rights and makes a being entitled to personhood,
according to Wise.
The first category of practical autonomy contains nonhuman
animals that should clearly have rights, while category four comprises those who
definitely don't qualify. Though most species may be placed in category three, meaning we
don't know enough about them to really decide, all of the animals Wise studies seem to
possess sufficient autonomy for basic liberty rights granted to most humans.
Honeybees, the species lowest on the evolutionary scale in
Wise's study, come in somewhere in the middle of his practical autonomy scale. Their
learning capacity, memory, communications, and rudimentary thinking skills have been
proven. Because they are insects, however intelligent, it is difficult o justify granting
them rights. After all, 100 billion bees a year are killed in the commercial production of
honey.
While we may have no trouble dismissing honeybees from the
discussion of legal rights, animals higher up the practical autonomy scale, such as
elephants, are more problematic. Wise journeys to Kenya's Amboseli National Park to see
Echo, the matriarch of an extended elephant family. "The emotional cords that bind
elephant families are acknowledged even by professional elephant exterminators who kill
for economic, alleged environmental, even aesthetic reasons," he says. Elephant
memory may be mythical, but there's a basis in truth. "Matriarchs' memories are a
storehouse of critical social information," he says. "Adult females may remember
the calls of a hundred elephants."
Chantek, an orangutan at the Atlanta zoo, has mastered a
sign language of 150 signs, is self-aware, manufactures and uses simple tools, and passes
simple awareness tests the author's four-year-old son fails. Even the family pet has a
great deal of human qualities that give it moral if not legal standing. Wise quotes
primatologist Frans de Waal: "Sometimes I read about someone saying with great
authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy
have a dog?'"
Overcoming the barriers to secure the rights of liberty for
animals presents many interwoven challenges. Billions of animals are used annually for
human needs--clothing, entertainment, research, food--and the use of animals is so
entrenched and widespread, involving vast sums of money in every industry, that the task
is formidable. Some would argue that humans have a god-given right to use animals as they
please. This right is such a part of human history--from horse-drawn chariots to caged
singing birds--that it would be impossible to reverse it. Adding to the complexity are
legal and psychological issues: Animals are things under the law, and millions of people
believe it.
Changing this mind-set will require a radically different
way of looking at animals, akin to the shift nineteenth-century societies experienced in
thinking about human slavery. Giving animals the right to vote, for example, is not the
future Wise posits, but the right to bodily integrity and security from torture and
exploitation may be on the horizon for some creatures, eventually resulting in their
recognition as legal persons.
Source: Drawing the Line: Science and
the Case for Animal Rights by Steven M. Wise. Perseus Publishing,
www.perseuspublishing.com. 2002. 322 pages. $26. Order here.
