Steven Wise is touring Australia as part of the 2015
Voiceless Animal Law lecture series.
You can watch his lecture in Sydney here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrQV7gZD9jtZy8QDHCPjfwFlEccV24T8x.
Wise has been writing about and more importantly, advocating
on behalf of nonhuman animals, for many years. Recently he founded the Nonhuman
Rights Project which aims to establish legal personhood for (some) nonhuman
animals.
To that end Wise has had a significant victory of late, with
Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe asking the State University of New York at Stony Brook to show cause as to why
it should be permitted to own, restrain and use Hercules and Leo; two chimpanzees
who are part of a University mobility study.
Steven Wise’s
law lecture tour raises the obvious question; what might this landmark case
mean for Australia?
Wise’s
litigation is an attempt to establish legal personhood for chimpanzees. Legal
personhood is good. In fact it is great. Legal personhood is closely equated
with rights, and rights are closely equated with strong interest protection. At
present nonhuman animals are property items at law. Legal personhood would
change all that.
Most
commentators agree that Wise is unlikely to succeed in this case and Hercules
and Leo are unlikely to get their freedom. If Wise is successful I expect the
decision will be appealed immediately. If Wise does win, and the ruling
withstands challenge, it will still only have local jurisdictional application
in a strict legal sense.
However,
that does not mean that the case is not important and it does not mean that its
impact will not be felt in Australia.
The use of
animals in research is the most secretive of all animal uses. As I document in
my book Animals, Equality and Democracy,
animal research is heavily regulated, but there is no mechanism by which the
community is permitted to engage in a dialogue about animal research.
Experiments are kept secret; deliberations by animal ethics committees are kept
secret; and in many (if not most) cases the results are not conclusive and are
never published. Suffice to say, where animals have an adverse reaction to an
experiment they are quietly killed and the community is none the wiser. This secrecy means that the community is not
permitted to reflect on the values, ethics, and process associated with animal
research.
The level
of secrecy is such that many Australians are unaware that Australia has three
primate breeding facilities or that an estimated 313 macaque or marmoset
monkeys were used in research in 2011, in Victoria alone.
If nothing
else, Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Animal Project are helping us start a much
needed, and long overdue, conversation. As Wise noted on the ABC’s Lateline, the State University of New
York at Stony Brook has not so much as acknowledged that they are in possession
of the two chimpanzees at the heart of his case. Nor have they been held to account by the
community. All that is about to change. Soon Hercules and Leo will have their
day in court.
Any type of
ventilation of what goes on behind closed laboratory doors is important. The
State University of New York at Stony Brook will be forced to show cause.
Perhaps they can do so successfully. But what is important is precisely that
they do have to do it. They have to make the case. It is no longer silently
assumed that animals are ours to experiment on or that one set of animal researchers
can approve the animal research of another set of animal researchers.
Asking the
question and having the debate is what matters. And what is discovered once
that discussion is had will have an impact on attitudes and behaviors around
the world, including in Australia, where we do regularly harm nonhuman primates
in the name of science.
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