Introduction (Page 1 of 3)
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Rattling the Cage is an important book, an exciting book. It will be welcomed by everyone who is concerned about the well being of animals, by those who are, as I am, kept awake by grim mental images of the abuse inflicted on other animals by humans. I was honoured when Steve Wise asked me to write this introduction, for I believe that Rattling the Cage, thanks to all the long years of research that went into the writing, will make an impact, and leave its mark on the process of Law. I see it as a major stepping stone along a road that is gradually leading to a new legal relationship between humans and other sentient, sapient life forms.

Steve Wise is a law school professor. He is also an accomplished animal rights legal scholar and one of the worlds' most prominent animal rights lawyers. Steve and his wife, Debi, defend a variety of animal species across the United States and advise those who defend animals around the world. In writing Rattling the Cage, Steve has used his experience in both science and law to great advantage, and he has a trial lawyer's knack for telling a good story. He explains, for example, why it matters so much today whether an ox who gored a passer-by on a road in the Middle East 4,000 years ago was Babylonian or Hebrew. And why, 400 years ago, an early animal advocate stood up for barley-eating rats in a French courtroom. And, most surprisingly, why John Quincy Adams would thunder on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives that he would present petitions to the Congress from horses or dogs if they asked him to.

In many ways this book can be seen as the animals' Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, and Universal Declaration of Rights all in one. And it is timely. Twenty-even ten-years ago Steve would have been out on a limb, ridiculed by his colleagues and largely ignored by the lay public. But attitudes towards animals have changed. Very few scientists today believe that non-human animals are simply mindless machines, collections of stimuli and responses. Of course, it would be convenient to believe that this was true, that there was a basic and fundamental difference between ourselves and the rest of the animal kingdom. Then we could do unpleasant things to them without any feelings of guilt. But this is scarcely an option today-there have been so many descriptions of incredibly complex social behavior and so many examples of intelligent behavior from so many careful field studies on a whole variety of animal species. Our 39 years with wild chimpanzees at Gombe, for example, has taught us much about these relatives of ours, each with his or her own unique personality. They share so many of our behaviours. They form close affectionate bonds with each other that may persist through a life of 60 or more years; they feel joy and sorrow and despair, mental as well as physical suffering; they show many of the intellectual skills that until recently we believed unique to ourselves; they look into mirrors and see themselves as individuals-they have consciousness of "self". Admittedly, chimpanzees are capable, as are we, of acts of brutality. But they also demonstrate empathy, compassion, altruism, and love. Should not beings of this sort have the same kind of legal rights as those we grant to human infants or the mentally disabled who also cannot speak for themselves?

 

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