In a ”Planet of the Apes”-style quest to grant primates the same liberties enjoyed by humans, lawyers for an animal-rights group shockingly compared their legal fight to the struggle of enslaved blacks in the US.
“We had a history of that for hundreds of years saying black people are not part of society and you can enslave them. That wasn’t right. It didn’t work,” said Steven Wise, head of the Nonhuman Rights Project.
His group is asking a Manhattan Supreme Court judge to grant a writ of habeas corpus to two chimpanzees living in a Stony Brook University lab in Suffolk County. If granted, the writ would free the 8-year-old chimps Hercules and Leo by declaring their confinement illegal.
Wise came before Justice Barbara Jaffee after losing their fight in three other state courts.
He extended the slavery comparison by saying that at one point in time courts didn’t recognize Native Americans as “legal persons” either.
Wise said chimps are “autonomous beings…they are self-conscious…they can understand what others are thinking…they plan for what their life is going to be like…they have language.
“Arbitrarily condemning an autonomous being to a life of slavery could eat away at the rights that we humans thought we had,” Wise claimed.
He went on to make the startling claim that locking up chimps “may be even worse than imprisoning human beings” because “they don’t even know why they’re there.”
Christopher Coulston, a lawyer with the state attorney general’s office who is representing Stony Brook, called the slavery parallel misplaced.
“The reality is these are fundamentally different species. They have no ability to partake in human society,” Coulston reasoned, noting that the group “has never met Hercules and Leo” and “doesn’t really know anything about the conditions they are held in.”
He said that the Jane Goodall-backed group ironically wants to move Hercules and Leo from a lab to another type of confinement, a tropical chimp sanctuary in Florida.
“They will undeniably be held there,” Coulston said. “They’re placed on island because they can’t swim. Their bodily liberty is still constrained.”
Justice Barbara Jaffee seemed wildly entertained by the two-hour chimp circus that was attended by around 100 activists including one toting a sign reading “Save Hercules and Leo.”
“I thank you counsel for your extremely interesting and well-argued oral arguments,” Jaffee said. She will decide whether or not to free the chimps in the coming weeks.
But the judge hinted she may rule in favor of the animal rights group calling the 800-year-old legal writ of habeas corpus a “powerful and broad tool subject to expansive interpretation.”