Demolishing a Wall
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For four thousand years, a thick and impenetrable legal wall has separated all human from all nonhuman animals. On one side, even the most trivial interests of a single species - ours - are jealously guarded. We have assigned ourselves, alone among the million animal species, the status of "legal persons." On the otherside of that wall lies the legal refuse of an entire kingdom, not just chimpanzees and bonobos but also gorillas, orangutans, and monkeys, dogs, elephants,, and dolphins. They are "legal things." Their most basic and fundamental interests - their pains, their lives, their freedoms - are intentionally ignored, often maliciously trampled, and routinely abused. Ancient philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and placed on this earth just for human beings. Ancient jurists declared that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy and science have long since recanted, the law has not.

This book demands legal personhood for chimpanzees and bonobos. Legal personhood establishes one's legal right to be "'recognized as a potential bearer of legal rights."' That is why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the American Convention on Human Rights nearly identically state that - "[e]veryone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law."' Intended to prevent a recurrence of one of the worst excesses of Nazi law, this guarantee is "often deemed to be rather trivial and selfevident"' because no state today denies legal personhood to human beings. But its importance cannot be overemphasized. Without legal personhood one is invisible to civil law. One has no civil rights, One might as well be dead.

Throngs of Romans scoot past the gaping Coliseum every day without giving it a glance. Athenians rarely squint up at their Parthenon perched high on its Acropolis. In the same way, when we encounter this legal wall, it is so tall,, its stones are so thick, and it has been standing for so long that we do not see it. Even after litigating for many years on behalf of nonhuman animals, I did not see it. I saved a handful from death or misery, but for most,, there was nothing I could do. I was powerless to represent them directly. They were things, not persons, ignored by judges. But I was butting into something. Finally I saw that wall.

In Chapters 2 through 4, we will see how it was built by the Babylonians four thousand years ago, then strengthened by the Israelites, Greeks, and Romans, and buttressed again by early Christians and medieval Europeans. As one might expect,, its mortar is now cracked and stones are missing. It may appear firm and sturdy, but its intellectual foundations are so unprincipled and arbitrary, so unfair and unjust, that it is crumbling. It has some years left, but it is so weak that one good book could topple it. This is meant to be that book.

In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, I hope to convince you that equality and liberty, the two most powerful legal principles and values of which Western law can boast, demand the destruction of that wall. But there are about 1 million species of animals. Many of them, say, beetles and ants, should never have these rights. So the wall must be rebuilt. But how? In Chapter 8, I will show you that the hallmark of the common law, which is the judge-made law of Englishspeaking peoples, is flexibility. It abhors thick high legal walls, except when they bulwark such fundamental interests as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and prefers sturdy dividers that can be dismantled and re-erected as new discoveries, morality, and public policy dictate.

 

<< Back --- Chapter One Continued >>

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