OPEDS: Grand Central Nature

[This is an archival essay (November 15th, 2010)] Reposted here by request
A Jug of Wine, a Loathe of Them, and Thou

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With original thread (Dissident Voice)

by Randy Shields
FIRST ITERATION APRIL 25, 2013

I used to be a very active animal activist. One of the things that I and my comrades would contend with was charges by others that we liked non-humans better than humans. “Why aren’t you doing something for people?” went the seemingly pre-recorded announcement from passing strangers at our demonstrations. And whenever you probed the loudest mouth of them all you’d find that he — inevitably a he — wouldn’t be donating his time to anybody, human or non-human. We activists were always calling up a list of things that we either did or were (nurses, therapists,  teachers, social workers, etc. ) or feeding vegan meals to the homeless or earnestly enumerating the many personal health and environmental benefits from not exploiting animals. Always trying to justify compassion and mercy to stone cold barbarians.


A couple weeks ago my girlfriend and I spent four days at the White Pig Bed and Breakfast, a 175-acre nature sanctuary in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville, Virginia. Soaking in the outdoor hot tub one night, we saw a shooting star and, later, turned off the jets and listened as various creatures walked about unseen in the dark woods. In the daytime we rubbed the snouts and bellies of the sanctuary’s resident pot-bellied pigs, hiked up to the top of the cascading Crabtree Falls (where it seems to rain lady bugs) and enjoyed all manner of trails in the splashy glowing Shenandoah Forest.


Many of us hiking in the Blue Ridge, or standing on the magnificent overlooks, would occasionally hear gunshots ringing out, reminding us that hunters were playing army against the animals we marvel at or gearing up to do so in the weeks ahead. It was the reminder that some people enjoy watching the light and life  go out of an innocent creature’s eyes.


Walking one day deep in a sunny valley there was nothing but stillness — and a four foot black snake lying zigzag  across the trail. We walked right in front of him and he never moved. I turned around and took a few pictures, capturing his angular pose, and then he finally slid on. It made me feel good that this creature was apparently not afraid of us. This was his land, his home he seemed to say. Why should he live in fear here? He and we seemed to be starting at ground zero with each other. And I like that feeling a lot. I like meeting creatures who have neither been terrorized nor tamed by humans.

No comment. Let your inner decency tell you what this is all about.

But what’s nature without a little  “red in tooth and claw,” courtesy of human shock and awe?  Many of us hiking in the Blue Ridge, or standing on the magnificent overlooks, would occasionally hear gunshots ringing out, reminding us that hunters were playing army against the animals we marvel at or gearing up to do so in the weeks ahead. It was the reminder that some people enjoy watching the light and life  go out of an innocent creature’s eyes. No empathy or appreciation of what it’s like to be unarmed, defenseless and shot, to be raising your family or searching for food or simply having a pleasant glorious day and then have someone come into your home (when their home of  superior comfort and ease is far away) and perform the profoundly cowardly act of shooting you. Practicing cowardice over and over again is utterly emasculating.

* *

Sometimes you explore to get lost and surprised and other times to find a setting for a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou. And sometimes all you get is a hearty satisfying loathe of THEM. Climbing the Humpback Mountain trail we found that the summit was grand central nature chock-a-block with “humanity” jostling for the highest bestest view near the edge of the giant Humpback Rock outcropping, complete with children falling on the slippery slanted rocks and their parents screaming after-the-fact warnings, all the while bumping others with well-provisioned voluminous backpacks  and ski poles (used as walking sticks) as they pin-balled yupward to the absolute top (civilization, i.e., the parking lot, was all of 20 minutes — downhill — away.)

A great place to contemplate nature as you can see — human nature. It didn’t matter that the entire view was spectacular wherever you stood, the humans already at the top wouldn’t budge so the new climbers could take their place and that didn’t stop the newcomers from pushing their way through the madding crowd. Peaceable me preferred a compromise where they embraced and then took a lovers’ leap. Remember, this is all on the edge of a 3,000 foot mountain.

There didn’t seem to be any appreciation by the conquerors that nature can be hazardous as well as beautiful. It was a jumbled pointless “rock” concert minus the music and dope. I fantasized that we might go one purple-assed baboon (thank you, William Burroughs) over the line sweet Jesus and the whole overhang would give way and we’d tumble into the valley below. That would teach us.

Well, no, it wouldn’t. Disaster doesn’t teach humans anything. If  it did, we wouldn’t be starting a new war in the Middle East every little whipstitch or give money to too big to fail banks so they can scarf up their competitors and become even too bigger to fail in the future. I’ll stick with the quiet sunlight on the dignified blacksnake. I could watch him for hours, but I couldn’t stand the humans on the peak of Humpback Mountain for 30 seconds. Sayonara. “What’s it like up there?” asked one ascending hiker on our way down. “It’s like Market Street in Philly — except there’s ski poles.”

* * *

After my first night back at work — I work in the automotive industry — I was driving home through Valley Forge  National Historical Park at 11:30 at night and the car in front of me swung into the oncoming lane to avoid something. And that something was a young deer sitting in the road, looking back and forth with her legs tucked under her. I stopped, put my flashers on and got out.

She was very afraid and tried rising on her front legs and dragged herself near some grass at the side of the road. Both of her back legs were badly injured. She looked around for help and I could hear her mother or another of her tribe snorting nearby in the darkness. I didn’t know what I could do for her so I walked over to her, knelt down, started petting her and talked to her. She eased up and didn’t try to get away. After a few moments, I got up.

Cars and cars and cars are going by. I’m offered all kinds of advice: “Don’t go near it, they’ll kick ya!”  Others asked if I needed some automotive help. Yeah, I need for you and me to get the fuck off this planet, I thought. I need for cars, these slaughterhouses on wheels, to die.  I wave the cars around. Why aren’t you people home in bed? Why are you and I on the roads at midnight on a Tuesday? Why do country roads have interstate-sized traffic on them? Why are there two busy roads right in the middle of what should be a 3,600-acre nature sanctuary?

I called my girlfriend and she gave me a couple numbers of wildlife rehabbers, one of whose recorded announcement said that they weren’t taking any calls that week and another whose recording advised calling the game commission. I left messages anyway and then decided there was no good answer for this deer so I called 911.

After about 15 minutes a couple park rangers pulled up behind me and I asked if anything non-lethal could be done for this creature. One said they would take care of it and that I should go. The ranger acted like I was a crazy person and this was a big joke. I was finding it hard to leave. I got in my car, started to drive then rolled down the window and, not knowing exactly what I wanted to say, uttered, “This is all very sad.” “Will you go now,”  he said. And after about five seconds of driving I heard a gunshot as they killed her.

* * * *

There’s a good chance, even without getting hit by a car and then shot, that that deer might have only lived two more weeks. That’s because Valley Forge National Historical Park is now in the first week of its first-ever deer kill, a $3 million four-year plan to kill 1,100 of the park’s estimated 1,277 deer. After the formality of “democracy,” a bogus public comment period which had all the effect of an antiwar sign on Dick Cheney, the park did what it was always going to do from the beginning.

In every park deer kill the cover story is always the “understory,” the  saplings, seedlings and shrubs that deer have the audacity to eat. These plants, plus ground-nesting birds and tulips (deer Tofutti), don’t compete very successfully with deer and that is something the Dr. Frankenstein park managers aim to change. The managers “manage” and disdain mere wilderness and wildlife sanctuaries where animals work out their own destinies. The hell with evolution or survival of the fittest. And all of this nature vivisection is done at the expense of the deer and must never inconvenience the humans, their tourism, their cars, their parking lots, their roads, the chemical run-off from their nearby farms or their high speed commerce.

Even compared to other parks, which have much less resources, Valley Forge park officials acted in very bad faith. Park officials admit that the deer population peaked in 2005 and has declined and stabilized, proving that the deer can be controlled without shooting. How many deer are in the park is also an open question because the park extrapolated its count from several “eyeball” surveys done by volunteers instead of conducting more accurate infrared aerial surveys before and after last year’s hard winter. Even working within their own murderous logic, park officials could choose not to shoot bucks so that the natural one to one ratio between bucks and does can be re-established faster and result in less deer being killed overall. Instead, the park’s plan is to kill bucks, does, young, old, healthy, unhealthy, whatever it takes to kill 500 deer this winter.

Beyond the understory cover story, the real story is this: it’s many people’s  perception that there’s too many large disobedient rebel animals who will not be contained by the average fence and who do not recognize capitalist property rights or the rules of the road which state: get the hell out of the human way. Valley Forge Park has been under pressure for years from wealthy land owners adjacent to the park, a noisy kind of Hostas Rights Movement, who lose thousands of dollars each year (they say) to deer eating their ornamental plants and shrubs. These money patriots love living near the park — they just don’t like the wildlife that comes with it. Do I relate to people who have thousands of dollars to spend each year on ornamental plants? Do I give a damn about their money or their mistaken view that they own the outdoors?  I don’t recognize their “property rights”  over nature or the illegitimate laws used to enforce them. I’m not “civilized,” thank God. Bambi and Proudhon believed the same  righteous thing: all property is theft — and I’m with them.

The deer are also unpopular with many motorists who are far too busy and important to slow down in the park. Presented with no stop signs, traffic lights or speed bumps, their perception is that “nothing’s here.” So, if they can, they blow through the park, often at 50 mph, because they know the frustration that awaits them on Routes 202 and 422 and the mordantly named Schuykill “Expressway,” one of the best monuments to civilization anywhere in the world.  No, nothing’s here, nothing except all these deer, foxes, raccoons, chipmunks, skunks, opossums, squirrels, turtles, snakes, frogs, birds and, yes, a bona fide predator of deer, a few coyotes.

Lowering the speed limit in the park from 35 to 25, and enforcing it, would probably eliminate nearly every deer/vehicle collision. For a brief time every day I bring the revolution to the park by going 25 mph. Since it’s clear that you, O working class, aren’t going to perform your historic mission, your real work of overthrowing capitalism, I don’t give one little damn about you being on time to your bogus work, your make-believe work, your slave work, your artificial world work, your obedient ass-kissing keep your head down work, your life-wasting soul-draining work, your manufacturing of death work, your unquestioning anti-Earth work. I don’t care about interrupting your lifelong inertia dream. Don’t get behind me because I will lead you nowhere, slowly. I’ll make you watch the black snake indefinitely or stand in a lady bug blizzard and I’ll comfort your enemies, like the deer.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Select comments 

  1. kalidas said on November 15th, 2010 at 2:15pm #In Pennsylvania 40,000 deer are hit by cars every year. That’s 40,000 not 4,000. Also hunters kill about 350,000 every year.These hunters also kill around 3,000 black bears every year.
  2. Maien said on November 15th, 2010 at 3:58pm #Great article! I enjoyed the play on Gibrans’ poetry, a man passionate about his humanity and the experience of ‘life’.
  3. Angie Tibbs said on November 16th, 2010 at 1:06am #Randy, I loved your article. Was with you from the opening line to the end, cheering, crying, smiling! Truly exceptional use of words.Chuckled at how you “bring your revolution to the park every day”! Can easily visualize the frustration of the speedsters gritting their teeth behind your 25 mph! Truly inspirational! Now if only numerous other motorists would follow your example …Can’t understand, though, how this park can be called a “wildlife sanctuary” when deer, instead of being safe within its boundaries, are at the mercy of animal killers.
  4. veganvenus said on November 17th, 2010 at 9:36pm #Great article. Of course the park officials’ primary concern has always been kowtowing to the rich folks who inhabit the perimeter of the park. While Valley Forge is an historical park and not a wildlife sanctuary, it would still seem to make sense to be somewhat concerned about safety. I was once told by a ranger that 45 miles per hour is the average speed of drivers on route 23, where the posted speed limit is 35 miles per hour. I suppose there is no money left for enforcing that after the $3million spent on mass murder.



BOOKS: The Conservative Belief in Human Supremacy Is Destroying Our Planet

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London enveloped in thick smog. Photo by David Holt London

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=By=
By Derrick Jensen / Seven Stories Press

The air around the world has recently been declared to be as carcinogenic as second hand smoke.

The following is an excerpt from the new book The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen (Seven Stories Press, 2016): 

“The modern conservative [and, I would say, the human supremacist] is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” —John Kenneth Galbraith

I’m sitting by a pond, in sunlight that has the slant and color of early fall. Wind blows through the tops of second-growth redwood, cedar, fir, alder, willow. Breezes make their way down to sedges, rushes, grasses, who nod their heads this way and that. Spider silk glistens. A dragonfly floats a few inches above the water, then suddenly climbs to perch atop a rush.

A family of jays talks among themselves.

Derrick Jensen-MythOfHumanSupremacyI smell the unmistakable, slightly sharp scent of redwood duff, and then smell also the equally unmistakable and also slightly sharp, though entirely different, smell of my own animal body.

A small songbird, I don’t know who, hops on two legs just above the waterline. She stops, cocks her head, then pecks at the ground.

Movement catches my eye, and I see a twig of redwood needles fall gently to the ground. It helped the tree. Now it will help the soil.

Someday I am going to die. Someday so are you. Someday both you and I will feed—even more than we do now, through our sloughed skin, through our excretions, through other means—those communities who now feed us. And right now, amidst all this beauty, all this life, all these others—sedge, willow, dragonfly, redwood, spider, soil, water, sky, wind, clouds—it seems not only ungenerous, but ungrateful to begrudge the present and future gift of my own life to these others without whom neither I nor this place would be who we are, without whom neither I nor this place would even be.

Likewise, in this most beautiful place on Earth—and you do know, don’t you, that each wild and living place on Earth is the most beautiful place on Earth—I can never understand how members of the dominant culture could destroy life on this planet. I can never understand how they could destroy even one place.

BOOK PRECIS  
In this impassioned polemic, radical environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen debunks the near-universal belief in a hierarchy of nature and the superiority of humans. Vast and underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life are explored in detail—from the cultures of pigs and prairie dogs, to the creative use of tools by elephants and fish, to the acumen of caterpillars and fungi. The paralysis of the scientific establishment on moral and ethical issues is confronted and a radical new framework for assessing the intelligence and sentience of nonhuman life is put forth.

Jensen attacks mainstream environmental journalism, which too often limits discussions to how ecological changes affect humans or the economy—with little or no regard for nonhuman life. With his signature compassionate logic, he argues that when we separate ourselves from the rest of nature, we in fact orient ourselves against nature, taking an unjust and, in the long run, impossible position. 

***

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast year someone from Nature [sic] online journal interviewed me by phone. I include the sic because the journal has far more to do with promoting human supremacism—the belief that humans are separate from and superior to everyone else on the planet—than it has to do with the real world. Here is one of the interviewer’s “questions”: “Surely nature can only be appreciated by humans. If nature were to cease to exist, nature itself would not notice, as it is not conscious (at least in the case of most animals and plants, with the possible exception of the great apes and cetaceans) and, other than through life’s drive for homeostasis, is indifferent to its own existence. Nature thus only achieves worth through our consciously valuing it.”


SIDEBAR
The company of our animal fellows is one of the most wonderful gifts we could possibly receive in our lives, and yet far too many humans fail to appreciate that simple fact, and act as brutal exploiters and destroyers of this patrimony. Below, animal lives, punctuated by innocence and —surprisingly, through human intervention—by hope. 

Humans lend a compassionate hand to a terribly hurt kitten.

(Published on Aug 14, 2016)

MILO arrived in SHOCK, practically dead. HEAD TRAUMA, MULTIPLE SKULL FRACTURES, DIFFERENT JAW FRACTURES, INFECTION, INFLAMMATION…. TERRIBLE!!

milo-wounded

The rescuers knew his life would never be normal, but at least Milo got a second chance. 



REGULAR ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the precise moment he said this to me, I was watching through my window a mother bear lying on her back in the tall grass, her two children playing on her belly, the three of them clearly enjoying each other and the grass and the sunshine. I responded, “How dare you say these others do not appreciate life!” He insisted they don’t.

I asked him if he knew any bears personally. He thought the question absurd.

This is why the world is being murdered.

***

Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture. A central unquestioned belief of this culture is that humans are superior to and separate from everyone else. Human supremacism is part of the foundation of much of this culture’s religion,  science, economics, philosophy, art, epistemology, and so on.

Human supremacism is killing the planet. Human supremacists—at this point, almost everyone in this culture—have shown time and again that the maintenance of their belief in their own superiority, and the entitlement that springs from this belief, are more important to them than the well-being or existences of everyone else. Indeed, they’ve shown that the maintenance of this self-perception and entitlement are more important than the continuation of life on the planet.

Until this supremacism is questioned and dismantled, the self-perceived entitlement that flows from this supremacism guarantees that every attempt to stop this culture from killing the planet will fail, in great measure because these attempts will be informed and limited by this supremacism, and thus will at best be ways to slightly mitigate harm, with the primary point being to make certain to never in any way question or otherwise endanger the supremacism or entitlement.

In short, people protect what’s important to them, and human supremacists have shown time and again that their sense of superiority and the tangible benefits they receive because of their refusal to perceive others as anything other than inferiors or resources to be exploited is more important to them than not destroying the capacity of this planet to support life, including, ironically, their own.

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(cc) Photo by leocub

Especially because human supremacism is killing the planet, but also on its own terms, human supremacism is morally indefensible. It is also intellectually indefensible. Neither of which seems to stop a lot of people from trying to defend it.

“Human supremacism is killing the planet. Human supremacists—at this point, almost everyone in this culture—have shown time and again that the maintenance of their belief in their own superiority, and the entitlement that springs from this belief, are more important to them than the well-being or existences of everyone else.”

The first line of defense of human supremacism is no defense at all, literally. This is true for most forms of supremacism, as unquestioned assumptions form the most common base for any form of bigotry: Of course humans (men, whites, the civilized) are superior, why do you ask? Or more precisely: How could you possibly ask? Or even more precisely: What the hell are you talking about, you crazy person? Or more precisely yet, an awkward silence while everyone politely forgets you said anything at all.

Think about it: if you were on a bus or in a shopping mall or in a church or in the halls of Congress, and you asked the people around you if they think humans are more intelligent than or are otherwise superior to cows or willows or rivers or mushrooms or stones (“stupid as a box of rocks”), what do you think people would answer? If you said to them that trees told you they don’t want to be cut down and made into 2x4s, what would happen to your credibility? Contrast that with the credibility given to those who state publicly that you can have infinite economic (or human population) growth on a finite planet, or who argue that the world consists of resources to be exploited. If you said to people in this culture that oceans don’t want to be murdered, would these humans listen? If you said that prairie dogs are in no way inferior to (or less intelligent than) humans, and you said this specifically to those humans who have passed laws requiring landowners to kill prairie dogs, would they be more likely to laugh at you or agree with you? Or do you think they’d be more likely to get mad at you? And just think how mad they’d get if you told them that land doesn’t want to be owned (most especially by them). If you told them there was a choice between electricity from dams and the continued existence of salmon, lampreys, sturgeon, and mussels, which would they choose? Why? What are they already choosing?

***

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is too abstract. Here is human supremacism. Right now in Africa, humans are placing cyanide wastes from gold mines on salt licks and in ponds. This cyanide poisons all who come there, from elephants to lions to hyenas to the vultures who eat the dead. The humans do this in part to dump the mine wastes, but mainly so they can sell the ivory from the murdered elephants.

Right now a human is wrapping endangered ploughshares tortoises in cellophane and cramming them into roller bags to try to smuggle them out of Madagascar and into Asia for the pet trade. There are fewer than 400 of these tortoises left in the wild.

Right now in China, humans keep bears in tiny cages, iron vests around the bears’ abdomens to facilitate the extraction of bile from the bears’ gall bladders. The bears are painfully “milked” daily. The vests also serve to keep the bears from killing themselves by punching themselves in the chest.  (See below.  Chinese Bear Bile Farms An extract from the gallbladder of bears is believed to have medicinal benefits, but animal welfare advocates aim to convince Chinese consumers of the barbarity of bile farming. China disgraces herself by permitting these practices. pinterest.com)

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Right now there are fewer than 500 Amani flatwing damselflies left in the world. They live along one stream in Tanzania. The rest of their home has been destroyed by human agriculture.

This year has seen a complete collapse of monarch butterfly populations in the United States and Canada. Their homes have been destroyed by agriculture.

Right now humans are plowing under and poisoning prairies. Right now humans are clearcutting forests. Right now humans are erecting mega-dams. Right now because of dams, 25 percent of all rivers no longer reach the ocean.

And most humans couldn’t care less.

Derrick Jensen-as-world-burnsRight now the University of Michigan Wolverines football team is hosting the Minnesota Golden Gophers. More than 100,000 humans are attending this football game. More than 100,000 humans have attended every Michigan home football game since 1975. There used to be real wolverines in Michigan. One was sighted there in 2004, the first time in 200 years. That wolverine died in 2010.

More people in Michigan—“The Wolverine State”—care about the Michigan Wolverines football team than care about real wolverines.

This is human supremacism.

***

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] just got a note from a friend who was visiting her son. She writes, “Yesterday morning when I emptied the compost bucket, the guy next door called out to ask if that was ‘garbage’ I was putting on the pile. I told him it was ‘compost.’ We went back and forth a couple of times. Then he said, ‘We don’t want no [sic] animals around here. I saw a raccoon out there. There were never any animals around here before.’ What better statement of human supremacism?”

***

Recently, scientists discovered that some species of mice love to sing. They “fill the air with trills so high-pitched that most humans can’t even hear them.” If “the melody is sweet enough, at least to the ears of a female mouse, the vocalist soon finds himself with a companion.”

Mice, like songbirds, have to be taught how to sing. This is culture, passed from generation to generation. If they aren’t taught, they can’t sing.

So, what is the response by scientists to these mice, who love to sing, who teach each other how to sing, who sing for their lovers, who have been compared to “opera singers”?

Given what the ideology of human supremacism does to people who otherwise seem sane, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the scientists wanted to find out what would happen if they surgically deafened these mice. And we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the mice could no longer sing their operas, their love songs. The deafened mice could no longer sing at all. Instead, they screamed.

And who could blame them? This is human supremacism.

***

Or there’s this. Just yesterday I spoke with Con Slobodchikoff, who has been studying prairie dog language for more than thirty years. Through observing prairie dogs non-intrusively in the field, he has learned of the complexity of their language and social lives. But he has done so, he said, without the aid of grants. Time and again he was told that if he wanted to receive money for his research—and if he wanted to do “real science” instead of “just” observing nature—he would have to capture some prairie dogs, deafen them, and then see how these social creatures with their complex auditory language and communal relationships responded to their loss of hearing. Of course he refused. Of course he didn’t receive the grants.

This is human supremacism.

***

And then today I got an email from a botanist friend who has worked for various federal agencies. His work has included identifying previously unknown species of plants. He said this work has not been supported by the agencies, because the existence of rare plants would interfere with their management plans, including the mass spraying of herbicides. His discoveries have been made on his own time and on his own dime.

It’s a good thing science is value free, isn’t it?

I told him Slobodchikoff had said to me that the scientific establishment makes it very difficult for people to manifest their love of the world. Slobodchikoff said this as someone who loves the earth very much.

My botanist friend agreed. “Science makes it very hard to love the world. Most scientists want the world to fit nice, clear, linear equations, and anything that doesn’t fit is ignored, unless you can get a publication out of it. Love isn’t a concept that would even come to mind concerning the natural world. The natural world is just a means to an end. A thing to be dissected, so they can get tenure. I was talking to a local botany professor, about how geology can drive speciation/change, and he was actually surprised to consider anything outside of genetic mechanisms. I was surprised at his surprise: his view just seemed so limited. A plant to him is an isolated, discrete entity, rather than the expression of the complex interactions and relationships between all the entities/factors in the environment going back 3.5 billion years.”

***

Or there’s this. I just saw a snuff video of scientists pouring molten aluminum into an anthill to reveal the shape of the tunnels. Then the scientists marveled at the beauty of the shape of the anthill they just massacred to the last ant.

This is human supremacism.

***

Or there’s this. The air around the world has recently been declared to be as carcinogenic as second hand smoke. The leading cause of lung cancer is now industrial pollution.

This is human supremacism.



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NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Derrick JensenActivist, philosopher, small farmer, teacher, leading voice of uncompromising dissent, Derrick Jensen holds degrees in creative writing and mineral engineering physics. His books include DreamsEndgame, Volumes 1 and 2As the World Burns, with Stephanie McMillanA Language Older Than WordsThe Culture of Make BelieveWhat We Leave Behind, with Aric McBayThe Derrick Jensen Reader, with Lierre Keith; and Deep Green Resistance, with Aric McBay and Lierre Keith.

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Perspectives On Socialism And Animal Rights

By Roland Windsor Vincent
Editor, Eco-Socialism, The Environment, and Animal Rights
The cause is urgent, but it’s a long journey

A raccoon dog, recently skinned alive for his fur. This is still regarded as legitimate and normal around much of the world, and the fur trade enjoys the status of a legitimate commercial occupation.

A raccoon dog, recently skinned alive for his fur. This is still regarded as legitimate and normal around much of the world, and the fur trade enjoys the status of a legitimate commercial occupation. Isaac Bashevis Singer was right in saying that, in a world dominated by humans, “each day was a Treblinka for the animals.”

Reaction to my contention that Animal Rights will only be won through Socialist revolution has been mixed, but much more positive than I had expected.

This is indicative of either a growing sophistication of Animal Rights activists or that the ranks of activists are swelling with those possessed of political acumen. Making my assertions even a few years ago would have elicited far different comments.

Negative criticism was dwarfed by positive responses, although that is hardly a scientific measure. Of the negative remarks a common theme emerged: Current and recent Socialist societies were as brutal to animals as any Capitalist ones, the logical conclusion then drawn being that the problem is people, or technology, or civilization, or something other than an economic system.

This is also the general rationale proffered by those Animal Rights activists who choose to remain apolitical. The usual canned response is that there is no difference between Liberals and Conservatives on animal issues.

I believe Socialism to be the only economic system that has a chance of embracing Animal Rights. And that is because Socialism offers no incentives to exploit, enslave, or murder animals. Unlike Capitalism, Socialism embraces a moral worldview. A moral compass suggests that the potential to extend compassion to animals is much more likely under Socialism than it would be under a system which is amoral to its core.

Those on the political Left have championed every advance in education, in democracy and freedom, in human rights. They have fought for the poor, the disenfranchised, and the exploited. In opposition to them on all these concerns have been Conservatives, who always defend the status quo.

The Liberals of 200 years ago fought against slavery but they were not ready to embrace racial equality. One planning on ending segregation would have found little support for the idea amongst 19th Century Liberals. But it is quite obvious that Liberals would have been the target audience for integration long before they embraced the cause, as it was a position naturally growing out of their social worldview.

Similarly, while it is true that today’s Socialists and Liberals have abysmal records on animal issues, we should not extrapolate those positions into the future. They are much more likely to embrace Animal Rights in the future than are Conservatives.

Evolving standards of decency, senses of compassion, and perceptions of justice all drive society to embrace an expanding circle of concerns about oppression, inequities, intolerance and exploitation.

Over time, the entire body politic moves ever to the Left. Today’s Conservatives are more Liberal than were the Liberals who ended slavery. Tomorrow’s Conservatives will be Left of today’s Liberals.

•••
•••
rolandVincentABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roland Windsor Vincent is an Animal Rights activist, political strategist, attorney, public speaker, and writer. He is now TGP’s Special Editor for Socialism, Environment & Animal Rights.

Friend him on Facebook: www.facebook.com/RolandWindsorVincent
Follow his blog:
www.ArmoryOfTheRevolution.com

 




His day in Court—A Chimpanzee Makes Legal History

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Credit: Alex Prager for The New York Times. Animatronic chimpanzee: AnimatedFX. Location: Diane Markoff’s DC Stages, Los Angeles. Props: Colin Roddick. Stylist: Callan Stokes.
NYT NowThis story is included with an NYT Now subscription.

Just before 4 p.m. on Oct. 10, Steven Wise pulled his rental car in front of a multiacre compound on State Highway 30 near the tiny Adirondack hamlet of Gloversville, N.Y., and considered his next move. For the past 15 minutes, Wise had been slowly driving the perimeter of the property, trying to get a better read on the place. An assortment of transport trailers — for horses and livestock, cars, boats and snowmobiles — cluttered a front lot beside a single-story business office with the sign “Circle L Trailer Sales” set above the door. At the rear of the grounds was a barn-size, aluminum-sided shed, all its doors closed, the few small windows covered in thick plastic.

With each pass, he looked to see if anybody was on the grounds but could find no one. A number of times Wise pulled off the road and called his office to check whether he had the right place. It wasn’t until he finally spotted a distant filigree of deer antlers that he knew for certain. The owner of Circle L Trailer, Wise had read, runs a side enterprise known as Santa’s Hitching Post, which rents out a herd of reindeer for holiday events and TV spots, including commercials for Macy’s and Mercedes-Benz.

After spotting a man tightening bolts on one of the trailer hitches, Wise paused to explain his strategy to me and the documentary filmmaker Chris Hegedus, who had a video camera. “I’m just going to say that I heard their reindeer were on TV,” Wise said. “I happened to be driving by and thought I might be able to see them in person.”

The repairman told Wise that the owner wasn’t on the premises that day. Wise mustered as many reindeer questions as he could, then got to his real agenda.

“So,” he finally asked, doing his best excited-tourist voice. “Do you keep any other animals around here?”

“Yeah,” the man answered, nodding toward the aluminum-sided shed. “In there. Name’s Tommy.”

Inside the shed, the repairman inched open a small door as though to first test the mood within. A rancid milk-musk odor wafted forth and with it the sight of an adult chimpanzee, crouched inside a small steel-mesh cell. Some plastic toys and bits of soiled bedding were strewn behind him. The only visible light emanated from a small portable TV on a stand outside his bars, tuned to what appeared to be a nature show.

“It’s too bad you can’t see him when he’s out in the jungle,” the repairman said, pointing to a passageway nearby, which opened onto an enclosure that housed a playground jungle gym. “At least he gets fresh air out there.”

NYT-mag-27animal
Tommy the chimpanzee inside his cage in Gloversville, N.Y., in October.  CreditPennebaker Hegedus Films, from “Unlocking The Cage”

Tommy’s original owner, we learned, was named Dave Sabo, the one-time proprietor of a troupe of performing circus chimps. The repairman said that Sabo raised Tommy, who appears to be in his 20s, from infancy. Sabo, who had been living for a number of years in a trailer on the grounds of Circle L Trailer, recently died.

“He’s back in there now somewhere,” the repairman said, quickly tracing with his hands what seemed to be the outline of an urn of ashes. “In a room next to Tommy’s.”

On the way back out to the car, Wise paused.

“I’m not going to be able get that image out of my mind,” he said, his voice quavering. “How would you describe that cage? He’s in a dungeon, right? That’s a dungeon.”

•••

Seven weeks later, on Dec. 2, Wise, a 63-year-old legal scholar in the field of animal law, strode with his fellow lawyers, Natalie Prosin, the executive director of the Nonhuman Rights Project (Nh.R.P.), and Elizabeth Stein, a New York-based animal-law expert, into the clerk’s office of the Fulton County Courthouse in Johnstown, N.Y., 10 miles from Circle L Trailer Sales, wielding multiple copies of a legal document the likes of which had never been seen in any of the world’s courts, no less conservative Fulton County’s.

‘I thought to myself, Well, if I’m interested in social justice, I can’t imagine beings who are being more brutalized than nonhuman animals.’

Under the partial heading “The Nonhuman Rights Project Inc. on behalf of Tommy,” the legal memo and petition included among their 106 pages a detailed account of the “petitioner’s” solitary confinement “in a small, dank, cement cage in a cavernous dark shed”; and a series of nine affidavits gathered from leading primatologists around the world, each one detailing the cognitive capabilities of a being like Tommy, thereby underscoring the physical and psychological ravages he suffers in confinement.

Along with chimps, the Nh.R.P. plans to file similar lawsuits on behalf of other members of the great ape family (bonobos, orangutans and gorillas) as well as dolphins, orcas, belugas, elephants and African gray parrots — all beings with higher-order cognitive abilities. Chimps were chosen as the first clients because of the abundance of research on their cognitive sophistication, and the fact that, at present, there are sanctuaries lined up to take in the plaintiffs should they win their freedom. (There are no such facilities for dolphins or orcas in the United States, and the two preferred sanctuaries for elephants were full.)

“Like humans,” the legal memo reads, “chimpanzees have a concept of their personal past and future . . . they suffer the pain of not being able to fulfill their needs or move around as they wish; [and] they suffer the pain of anticipating never-ending confinement.” What Tommy could never have anticipated, of course, huddled just up the road that morning in his dark, dank cell, was that he was about to make legal history: The first nonhuman primate to ever sue a human captor in an attempt to gain his own freedom.

Animals Are Persons Too

This short documentary follows the lawyer Steven Wise’s effort to break down the legal wall that separates animals from humans.   Credit By Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker on Publish Date April 23, 2014

Animals are hardly strangers to our courts, only to the brand of justice meted out there. In the opening chapters of Wise’s first book, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals,” published in 2000, he cites the curious and now largely forgotten history, dating at least back to the Middle Ages, of humans putting animals on trial for their perceived offenses, everything from murderous pigs, to grain-filching rats and insects, to flocks of sparrows disrupting church services with their chirping. Such proceedings — often elaborate, drawn-out courtroom dramas in which the defendants were ostensibly accorded the same legal rights as humans, right down to being appointed the best available lawyers — were essentially allegorical rituals, a means of expunging evil and restoring some sense of order to a random and disorderly world.

Among the most common nonhuman defendants cited by the British historian E. P. Evans in his 1906 book, “The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals,” were pigs. Allowed to freely roam the narrow, winding streets of medieval villages, pigs and sows sometimes maimed and killed infants and young children. The “guilty” party would regularly be brought before a magistrate to be tried and sentenced and then publicly tortured and executed in the town square, often while being hung upside down, because, as Wise explains it in “Rattling the Cage,” “a beast . . . who killed a human reversed the ordained hierarchy. . . . Inversion set the world right again.”

The practice of enlisting animals as unwitting courtroom actors in order to reinforce our own sense of justice is not as outmoded as you might think. As recently as 1906, the year Evans’s book appeared, a father-son criminal team and the attack dog they trained to be their accomplice were prosecuted in Switzerland for robbery and murder. In a trial reported in L’Écho de Paris and The New York Herald, the two men were found guilty and received life in prison. The dog — without whom, the court determined, the crime couldn’t have been committed — was condemned to death.

It has been only in the last 30 years or so that a distinct field of animal law — that is laws and legal theory expressly for and about nonhuman animals — has emerged. When Wise taught his first animal-law class in 1990 at Vermont Law School, he knew of only two others of its kind in the country. Today there are well over a hundred. Yet while animal-welfare laws and endangered-species statutes now abound, the primary thrust of such legislation remains the regulation of our various uses and abuses of animals, including food production, medical research, entertainment and private ownership. The fundamental legal status of nonhumans, however, as things, as property, with no rights of their own, has remained unchanged.

Credit Alex Prager for The New York Times. Animatronic chimpanzee: AnimatedFX. Location: Diane Markoff’s DC Stages, Los Angeles. Props: Colin Roddick. Stylist: Callan Stokes.

Wise has devoted himself to subverting that hierarchy by moving the animal from the defendant’s table to the plaintiff’s. Not in order to cast cognitively advanced beings like Tommy in a human light, but rather to ask a judge to recognize them as individuals in and of themselves: Beings entitled to something that, without us, no wild animal would ever require — the fundamental right, at least, not to be wrongfully imprisoned.

Tracking down captive backyard chimps as clients is not the sort of career Wise imagined for himself. But then neither was law. A self-described apolitical lead singer in a rock band who thought he would have a career in music, Wise’s increasing involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement while at the College of William and Mary began to stoke a growing interest in social activism.

__________

Essentially a wrong is a wrong is a wrong. —Eds

___________

Over lunch in Manhattan one afternoon a few weeks after finding Tommy, Wise told me he thought that he was going to be a doctor, but he didn’t get into medical school. He ended up working as a lab technician in Boston, all the while continuing his antiwar activities. “Then one day, I thought to myself, You know, I think I want to be a lawyer,” he said. “I had become really interested in issues of social justice.”

Several years after graduating from Boston University School of Law, he sat down with a copy of Peter Singer’s seminal work, “Animal Liberation,” and got the “jolt” that has directed his passions ever since. “It was a total epiphany,” he recalled. “I just had never thought about what was going on out there with our treatment of animals. First, I became a vegetarian. Then I thought to myself, Well, if I’m interested in social justice, I can’t imagine beings who are being more brutalized than nonhuman animals. People could do whatever they wanted with them and were doing whatever they wanted with them. Nonhuman animals had no rights at all. I couldn’t think of any other place where my participation could do more good. I suddenly realized this is why I became a lawyer.”

‘The lawyer for the aquarium was so outraged. He kept saying, “Judge, our own dolphin is suing us!” ’

He dedicated himself to getting a better sense of the general arc over the course of history of human thinking about animals. From Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being that ranked animals, because they lacked reason, below man; to René Descartes’s view of animals as complex but soulless automatons; to Immanuel Kant’s argument against cruelty to animals, not because of any specific obligation to them but because such cruelty had an adverse effect on human relations; to the assertion by the 19th-century British philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham that the only arbiter of how we treat animals “is not ‘can they reason?’ nor ‘can they talk?’ but ‘can they suffer?’ ” a view that would profoundly influence the work of modern-day animal rights thinkers like Peter Singer.

In 1991, Wise filed an early animal rights lawsuit that both underscored the difficulty of the challenge he would be facing and helped him hone his legal strategy. The case, filed in the United States District Court of Massachusetts against the New England Aquarium, was on behalf of Kama, a 6-year-old dolphin, and several animal rights groups that objected to the aquarium’s transfer of Kama to the Navy for training at the Naval Ocean Systems Center in Hawaii, a violation, the suit claimed, of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The judge immediately dismissed Kama’s part of the suit due to insufficient “standing”: the legal requirement that a plaintiff personally speak to the injury that has been done to him or her by the defendant and then show that such harm can be properly redressed by the court — a requirement that Kama, of course, could never have met.

A nonhuman is, in fact, so invisible in a court of law that the only way such a creature can seek redress is if the human plaintiffs representing that animal can prove that the injury done to it has in some way injured them. After several days of deliberation, the judge ultimately decided that the humans, too, had failed to adequately prove injury and threw out their part of the suit on the basis of standing as well.

“The lawyer for the aquarium was so outraged,” Wise said. “He kept saying, ‘Judge, our own dolphin is suing us!’ And I understand that outrage. He felt: ‘We own this. This is completely ours, and what is ours is now claiming we can’t do something to it?’ But what these cases made me realize is that the issue wasn’t really about standing at all. What lawyers and judges had been calling an ‘animal-standing problem’ was really a ‘not-being-a-legal-person problem.’ We could show the animals had been injured, that the defendants were responsible and that the judge could remedy it. But because animals are not legal persons, they don’t even have the capacity to sue in the first place. They’re totally invisible. I knew if I was going to begin breaking down the wall that divides human and nonhumans, I first had to find a way around this issue of personhood.”

Steven Wise at his home office in Coral Springs, Fla. CreditChip Litherland for The New York Times

A few years later, while continuing to lecture in animal jurisprudence to law students, Wise revisited the famous case of Somerset v. Stewart. In 1772, the chief justice of the English Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield, issued a writ of habeas corpus — a court order requiring that a prisoner be brought before a judge by his or her captor in order to rule on the legality of that prisoner’s detainment — on behalf of a slave named James Somerset, a being as invisible then to the law as any nonhuman. Mansfield ultimately decided to free Somerset from his Scottish-American owner, Charles Stewart — a landmark decision that would drive one of the first wedges into the wall then dividing black and white human beings from one another.

The Somerset case soon had Wise exploring other habeas corpus cases. He noted that many of them were filed on behalf of those unable to personally appear in court: prisoners, for example, or children, or mentally incapacitated adults. Habeas corpus cases, Wise realized, have the most relaxed standing requirements, precisely because the circumstances necessitate that a proxy like Wise plead the plaintiff’s case.

As Wise started to formulate it further, he saw habeas corpus as a form of redress for the denial of a “legal person’s” right to bodily liberty, not necessarily a “human being’s.” At lunch, he outlined a broad spectrum of cases in which nonhumans have been held to be legal persons, like ships, corporations, partnerships and states. He invoked cases in India in which the holy book of the Sikhs was deemed a legal person, as well as Hindu idols. He spoke of a dispute between the Crown of New Zealand and the Maori tribe in which a river was held to be a legal person.

“A legal person is not synonymous with a human being,” he told me. “A legal person is an entity that the legal system considers important enough so that it is visible and [has] interests” and also “certain kinds of rights. I often ask my students: ‘You tell me, why should a human have fundamental rights?’ There’s not a single person on earth I’ve ever put that question to who can answer that without referring to certain qualities that a human has.”

In his animal-law classes, Wise told me, he has his students consider the actual case of a 4-month-old anencephalic baby — that is, a child born without a complete brain. Her brain stem allows her to breathe and digest, but she has no consciousness or sentience. No feelings or awareness whatsoever. He asks the class why we can’t do anything we want with such a child, even eat her.

“We’re all instantly repelled by that, of course,” Wise said. When he asked his students that question, they “get all tied up in knots and say things like ‘because she has a soul’ or ‘all life is sacred.’ I say: ‘I’m sorry, we’re not talking about any characteristics here. It’s that she has the form of a human being.’ Now I’m not saying that a court or legislature can’t say that just having a human form is in and of itself a sufficient condition for rights. I’m simply saying that it’s irrational. . . . Why is a human individual with no cognitive abilities whatsoever a legal person with rights, while cognitively complex beings such as Tommy, or a dolphin, or an orca are things with no rights at all?”

The other advantage of habeas corpus cases, Wise said he realized, is they allow him to circumvent federal courts, where judges tend to rule in accordance with what they perceive to be the original intentions of pre-existing statutes and laws. State courts, by contrast, where almost all habeas corpus cases are heard, are the home of common law — what Wise often characterizes as a breeding ground of ever-evolving laws where for the past 800 years judges have been making decisions based more on the available evidence and on broader principles like equality and liberty and what is morally right. The common law is the realm in which Wise feels he has the best chance to succeed. “I have to present an argument that a judge can grasp quickly. I have to go bang, bang, bang, detailing the distinct qualities of my clients. We’re definitely asking a judge to make a leap of faith here; what some might see as a quantum leap. My job is to make it seem as small as possible.”

No recent case better underscores the unique nature of Wise’s present endeavor than the one that seemed, at first, to most resemble it. In October 2011, despite Wise’s objections, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit on behalf of five orcas at SeaWorld San Diego and SeaWorld Orlando, accusing the theme park of violating the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. The suit was dismissed by Judge Jeffrey Miller of the U.S. District Court for Southern California, who wrote in his ruling that “the only reasonable interpretation of the 13th Amendment’s plain language is that it applies to persons, and not to nonpersons such as orcas.”

Wise was furious over what he considered the grossly premature timing of PETA’s case. After the judge’s decision, Wise called a PETA lawyer to “share his thoughts” with him. Natalie Prosin was on that call too. “She really let me have it afterward,” Wise said. “She said, ‘You acted like you were the professor and he was your student, lecturing him for over 30 minutes on why his case was so bad.’ I said: ‘I know. And frankly 30 minutes wasn’t nearly enough.’ It was idiotic to invoke the Constitution the first time around. You know maybe in 50 years, after you’ve already laid a foundation of courts recognizing that nonhuman animals could be considered legal persons under the common law. That’s precisely why we’re avoiding the federal courts.”

As hasty an overreach as Wise thought PETA’s legal gambit to be, the Nh.R.P.’s has been plodding and precise. As many as 70 volunteers have been working over the past four years on different facets of his legal offensive. Perhaps the most important is the Nh.R.P.’s Science Working Group, which collaborates with Dr. Lori Marino, an Emory University specialist in the cetacean brain and the evolution of animal intelligence. This group is assigned the task of gathering available research and expert testimony on the cognitive abilities of the plaintiffs that the Nh.R.P. plans to represent.

As recently as 10 years ago Wise’s effort would have been laughed out of a courtroom. What has made his efforts viable now, however, is in part the advanced neurological and genetic research, which has shown that animals like chimpanzees, orcas and elephants possess self-awareness, self-determination and a sense of both the past and future. They have their own distinct languages, complex social interactions and tool use. They grieve and empathize and pass knowledge from one generation to the next. The very same attributes, in other words, that we once believed distinguished us from other animals. Wise intends to wield this evidence in mounting the case that his clients are “autonomous beings,” ones who are able, as Wise defines that term, “to freely choose, to self-determine, to make their own decisions without acting from reflex or innate behavior.” He sees these abilities as the minimum sufficient requirement for legal personhood.

Another element of the Nh.R.P.’s strategy is the Legal Working Group, which selects optimal jurisdictions for their lawyers and then finds potential clients there, a reversal of the typical process in which a lawyer has a client and then argues their case in whatever jurisdiction that client happens to live. For the first set of cases, the 20 or so members of the Legal Working Group scoured the records on the habeas corpus rulings of all 50 states and composed memos, each at least 15 pages, before finally settling on New York, where seven privately owned chimps were being held throughout the state.

Wise, Prosin, Stein and Monica Miller, another lawyer, filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of four of the chimps (the three others died before the Nh.R.P. could do so). The day after Tommy’s case was presented, the lawyers were in Niagara Falls, N.Y., filing on behalf of a chimp there named Kiko. Two days after that, they traveled to Riverhead, N.Y., on Long Island, to file a third suit in the name of Leo and Hercules, two chimps being kept at Stony Brook University for studies on human locomotion.

In addition, the Nh.R.P.’s Sociological Working Group has been collecting whatever information it can on the judges within a prospective jurisdiction, everything from their sex, age and political party to their leisure activities and whether or not they own pets. It’s all by way of getting the best sense of the kind of judge the plaintiffs might be facing.

The hope is that they will get what Wise calls a “substantive-principles judge,” one not as bound by precedent, who makes what he or she believes is a just decision, regardless of what ramifications the decision may have. A judge like Lord Mansfield, who before setting the slave James Somerset free, said, “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum” (“Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall”).

“I’m looking for a Lord Mansfield,” Wise told me, “but as I often tell my students, be careful what you wish for. You may get a principles judge, and it turns out that the principles the judge holds are the ones that make him say: ‘You lose. I don’t agree with your principles. I agree with the principle that God created humans, and we all have souls, and we’re special, and nonhuman animals do not and so aren’t.’ And in that case you’ve just shot yourself in the head.”

Of course, a number of people both in the legal world and beyond find the very premise of seeking legal personhood for animals an oxymoron. There are, they assert, already ample protections available under current animal-welfare laws, on both the federal and state levels, without having to go down the practically and philosophically fraught path of extending a human right to a nonhuman.

Richard Epstein, a New York University law professor, is an outspoken critic of Wise and of the notion of extending rights to animals. He bridles at what he sees as the potential practical consequences of such an outcome, a slippery-slope effect that would eventually abolish long-established institutions like the agriculture-and-food-production industry.  “[T]here would be nothing left of human society,” Epstein once asserted in a 1999 essay, “The Next Rights Revolution?” “if we treated animals not as property but as independent holders of rights.” He also considers Wise’s legal approach to be “completely misguided.”

“Steven is extremely ingenious,” Epstein told me in his N.Y.U. office in January. “I don’t think he’s a great intellect. He’s a man of tremendous persistence. He just doesn’t think there is any serious argument that can be made on the other side. It’s like watching someone with tunnel vision. . . . My attitude is this: There are two ways to think about it. He thinks of it as rights. I think about it as protection. You can guarantee the things he’s seeking through animal-protection legislation without calling them rights. I mean, you may want to enforce the laws better. I just think the argument of making animals into sort of human beings is what’s crazy.”

But Wise contends that present forms of protection are effectively unenforceable in a case like Tommy’s, primarily because under current animal-welfare laws on both the state and federal levels, it isn’t illegal to keep a chimp in a cage, Tommy’s present owner, Pat Lavery, has said that Tommy’s cage is legal and inspected annually. In those cases in which cages do not meet proper standards, animals are rarely taken from their owners because they’re still considered private property.

Ultimately, Wise is not interested in trying to distinguish between bad and better forms of captivity. What he is trying to provoke is a paradigm shift in how we think of our relationship to animals. “One day we’ll be filing a suit on behalf of SeaWorld orcas,” Wise said, “these amazingly intelligent and social animals who were captured from the ocean and are now being kept in a tiny pool, and yet obviously it’s not illegal. SeaWorld is making tens of millions of dollars a year. No one is suggesting they be charged with cruelty to animals, and nobody has any ideas about how to get those orcas out. It’s the same thing with chimpanzees. So the reason we chose habeas corpus over other causes of action is that it’s the only possible remedy.”

Even some in the animal rights community have criticized Wise for the anthropocentrism of stressing his clients’ similarity to us rather than that basic Benthamic barometer of “can they suffer?” For Wise, though, “can they suffer?” is still the defining arbiter. It’s simply one that has been lent a whole new meaning and level of urgency by something obviously unavailable to a 19th-century British philosopher: the ever-growing body of scientific evidence pushing us into the increasingly discomfiting corner of knowing that, in the end, it isn’t really his clients’ likeness to us but their distinctly different and yet compellingly parallel complexity that now may command not just a philosophical regard but a legal one as well.

At just past 2 p.m. on Dec. 2, Nh.R.P.’s legal team of Wise, Prosin and Stein sat at the plaintiff’s table in the main courtroom of the Montgomery County courthouse in Fonda, N.Y., nervously awaiting the entrance of Justice Joseph M. Sise.

Wise had told me what he could expect from a decision made in a lower court like this one. “At this level,” he said, “it’s not going to be an emotional decision, but a very practical, serious one. The judge is going to want to rule in a way in which he feels reasonably supported by the existing laws. He doesn’t want to look like an idiot. But if he’s willing to hear the case, or even write a decision on it, as long as his rejection goes on the record, we can go to the Court of Appeals. That’s where you can argue with more emotion and where most common law gets made anyway.”

On the drive from Johnstown to the courthouse, Prosin was on her phone, trying to get information on Sise, a justice on the State Supreme Court. “Brother was a judge,” Prosin muttered. “Father a judge. He’s young. Graduated law school 1988. Conservative Republican.” There was, however, little clear indication of whether he might be a Lord Mansfield.

Now in the courtroom, a voice called, “All rise.” Through a sudden opening in the room’s oak paneling, Sise, a tall, lean, dark-haired man in his early 50s, emerged and strode swiftly to his seat at the bench. Wise listened, rapt as Sise spoke the words he had been waiting his entire career to hear in court: “This is in the matter of . . . an application . . . seeking a writ of habeas corpus for a nonhuman.”

When Sise asked Wise why Article 70 of the Civil Practice Law and Rules — New York State’s habeas corpus provision — “should be enlarged to include an animal, a chimpanzee,” the typically voluble Wise struggled to speak. You could almost hear the gears of his brain snagging, the various lines of argument that he had been planning and honing over the years for this very moment, getting all bound up now into one hopeless snarl.

“I couldn’t believe I was finally about to argue this case before a judge,” he told me later. “I really got choked up for a moment.”

The hearing took no more than 20 minutes. The justice interrupted often at the start, pre-empting Wise’s attempts at building an argument, knocking him back on his heels with repeated questions about why Article 70 was the only form of redress in this instance.

“Isn’t there a different way,” Sise asked at one point, “for you to petition the court for . . . relief other than attempting to have the Supreme Court . . . enlarge the definition of ‘human-being’ under Article 70 to include an animal?”

“We are most definitely not asking the court to redefine the term ‘human being,’ ” Wise boomed, his heart at last having loosened its grasp on his throat. “We brought a writ of habeas corpus because [it] is aimed at the denial of a legal person’s, not necessarily a human being’s, but a legal person’s right to bodily liberty.”

Wise next began to make his case for why all chimps in New York should be declared legal persons, arguing that they are fully autonomous beings. “Says who?” Sise asked. “And . . . I’m asking the question because that’s beyond your ken and beyond my ken. It’s beyond the ken of the normal fact-finder. You’re stating something that only expert testimony could supply.”

Wise quickly cited the affidavits from the world’s leading primatologists. The previously curt and pre-emptive Sise fell silent, leaning in, his head nodding slightly.

“So what is it that you’re asking the court to do in terms of Article 70, make an exception for chimpanzees only?” Sise asked. “You understand the question, right? The legal conundrum the court is in based upon your argument?”

“We are, in a specific, legal way . . . simply asking that you issue the writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Tommy,” Wise began calmly. “We are saying the reason that this court should do that is Tommy, as these experts pointed out, is autonomous. . . . Being a member of the species homosapiens is indeed a sufficient condition for personhood, but there are other sufficient conditions for personhood, as well. . . . Autonomy is an extraordinarily important attribute, and we argue . . . that a being who is autonomous, who can choose, who is self-aware, these, your honor, are essentially us.”

“All right,” Sise said. “What else? Anything else?”

Wise appeared spent. “No, your honor.”

The justice sat back in his chair. “Your impassioned representations to the court are quite impressive,” he said. “The court will not entertain the application, will not recognize a chimpanzee as a human or as a person . . . who can seek a writ of habeas corpus under Article 70. I will be available as the judge for any other lawsuit to right any wrongs that are done to this chimpanzee, because I understand what you’re saying. You make a very strong argument. However, I do not agree with the argument only insofar as Article 70 applies to chimpanzees. Good luck with your venture. I’m sorry I can’t sign the order, but I hope you continue. As an animal lover, I appreciate your work.”

I managed to get hold of Sise on the phone a few weeks later and asked him about his ruling. “I thought they should have an opportunity to make their argument as to why Article 70 should be enlarged to include nonhumans,” Sise said. “Ultimately, I felt that they had the right to make a record so that they could appeal. I thought, Here’s this group of lawyers, living and dying this, they deserve due process, and they deserve to be told just how impressed at least I was by the effort they’re making on behalf of animals.”

I said that I imagined it wasn’t the sort of case that came across his desk very often.

“Obviously not,” he said, laughing. “But in terms of the legal questions before the court, it was very similar to many applications we have: Whether or not a petition has been rightfully filed under an article and whether that article applies. So the legal analysis was not novel, although the facts certainly were.”

The Nh.R.P. ended up losing their other two New York cases as well, with the judges arguing that the petitioners had other remedies they could seek through existing animal-protection laws. But before Justice Ralph A. Boniello III, of the State Supreme Court for the County of Niagara, rendered his decision, Wise was given full leave to air for the record his petition on behalf of Kiko. The justice called the argument “excellent” but concluded that he was “not prepared to make this leap of faith.”

On balance, Wise and his colleagues emerged from their first round of suits ecstatic. They had all they needed to take the cases to the appellate level to keep making their argument.

In February, the Nh.R.P. lawyers were in New York City for a weekend-long meeting to refine their pending appeals for later this year and to decide on the next roster of plaintiffs. In a couple of weeks Wise would be back on the road, reviewing new prospects: mostly chimps and a few circus elephants. For the latter, Wise told me, the California-based animal-protection organization PAWS is willing to provide sanctuary on a case-by-case basis.

Over dinner one night, I asked Wise about the oft-stated position that there are already ample forms of redress for the likes of Tommy. Did he ever feel that gaining legal rights for such creatures is really a symbolic gesture? As Richard Epstein put it in his N.Y.U. office, “He’s just sticking his fingers in your eyes.”

“In whose eyes?” Wise said, smiling. “In the world’s eye? For what purpose? Look, he’s a law professor. He doesn’t practice law. If he does, it isn’t this kind of law. It’s hardly symbolic for the animals.”

I reminded Wise at one point that he, the crusader against speciesism and ordained hierarchies, has been accused of erecting a speciesist hierarchy of his own by singling out only certain sufficiently sophisticated animals to represent in court. I asked him, for example, if he would also consider filing a suit on behalf of a captive vervet monkey or a tortoise or a rat.

“I don’t know the answer to the question,” he responded. “The reason I do know the answer for the animals we are currently choosing to represent is we’ve spent years trying to understand what their cognitive capabilities are. But we feel very comfortable in saying that for any nonhuman animal who is autonomous, whatever species they may be, then we will go into court and make the argument that they have a sufficient condition for rights. We’ve never claimed it’s a necessary condition, and as the public debate evolves, people may be making other arguments based on other factors. I mean, how autonomous do you have to be anyway? Look at human beings. We all have rights, and we range from drooling, nonautonomous people to people who are extraordinarily autonomous, like Richard Epstein.”

Wise told me he was well aware of the fact that for creatures like Tommy, a victory in court could only result in transfer to a kinder type of captivity. The larger significance of winning for Wise, however, is the clear message it sends about the wrongfulness of holding captive a chimp or a circus elephant or a SeaWorld orca in the first place.

In a 2001 debate with Peter Singer, Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit — who has debated Wise as well — argued that only facts will lead to according animals rights, not intuitions. “Much is lost,” Posner stated at one point, “when . . . intuition is made a stage in a logical argument.”

And yet in that same debate, Posner stated that the special status we humans accord ourselves is based not on tests or statistics but on “a moral intuition deeper than any reason that could be given for it and impervious to any reason that you or anyone could give against it.” That inherent irrationality at the heart of humanity’s sense of exceptionalism is what most worries Wise.

“It’s those deeply held beliefs that I’m concerned about,” he told me. “The judge who either doesn’t recognize that he’s ruling against us on those grounds, or who does, and decides that way anyway. Our challenge is to lay bare that bias against our facts. I will say: ‘Judge, you know, we’ve been here before. We’ve had people who’ve essentially said, “I’m sorry, but you’re black.” Or “I’m sorry, you’re not a male or a heterosexual.” And this has led us to some very bad places.’ ”

Much like other civil rights movements, the Nh.R.P.’s efforts are designed to be a systematic assault; a continued and repeated airing of the evidence now at hand so that other lawyers and eventually judges and society as a whole can move past what Wise considers the increasingly arbitrary distinction of species as the determinant of who should hold a right.

Wise said he doesn’t expect to win in the first round of suits, and neither does he in the fifth or the 20th. “For me this has been a 25-year plan. All my books and my courses were designed to help me think through this problem. Now I want to spend the rest of my life litigating. If we lose, we keep doing it again and again, until we find a judge who doesn’t feel that the way is closed off. Then our job is to produce the facts that will allow that judge to make that leap of faith. And when it happens, it will be huge. I wouldn’t be spending my life on this otherwise.”




OpEds: The Misrepresentation of Sochi in the Western Media

sochiDeadStraysBy Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey, Pravda.ru

Surprise, surprise, surprise. The US media almost without exception concentrated on toilets, light bulbs, stray dogs as much as, or more than, the sport, the celebration, the party and the spectacle which is Sochi, the XXII Winter Olympic Games. It comes as no surprise that the showing of the Opening Ceremony in the USA was a study in manipulation.

While Canada showed the Opening Ceremony live, the USA’s NBC had exclusive rights, and showed bits and pieces, heavily censored, with a ten-hour delay. It comes as no surprise that the bits edited out, or censored, were those showing Russia in a positive light, such as the words of thanks to Russia from the International Olympic Committee President, such as the appearance of President Yanukovich of the Ukraine, where Washington is meddling, such as the remarkable and moving celebration of Russia’s unequalled history and culture…

It comes as no surprise that the US censorship of arguably the main feature of the Games came as the cherry on the cake of a campaign which went back to 2010, with reports in the Russian edition of Esquire magazine that the cost of infrastructure development was absurdly high (8 billion USD for 48 kilometres of roads), and therefore – wait for the buzzword – the notion was launched that Corruption! was rife.

The image created well before Sochi began for the readers of this magazine, and the public in general, swayed by gossip-mongers in hairdressers’ salons and the like, was that Sochi was a monument of negativity from the outset, the image conjured up being one of rampant corruption and misuse of funds. What the article did not bother to say was that the funding included 50 bridges and 27 kilometres of tunnels through mountains, and here we throw the ball back – how many western countries would achieve that for 8 billion USD?

No mention that all the infrastructures in Sochi had to be created from the roots upwards but lots of quips about gays. No mention about the fact that the so-called “anti-gay” laws were in fact not about criminalizing homosexual activity (which is not a criminal offence, indeed homosexuals enjoy the same rights as anyone else in Russia, they are free to serve in the armed forces for instance) but rather, an attempt to curb the exposure of non-traditional sexual practices in places were minors could witness them. It is not a law about banning gays, it is a law to protect children from pornography and unsuitable images.

And then the nonsense about security and safety. Let us be honest: if the United States of America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East, namely Saudi Arabia and Qatar, stopped arming, training, aiding and abetting terrorists through unofficial or official channels, the world would be a far safer place. Russian security forces, like their American counterparts, work daily to help protect the lives of ordinary citizens and their right to go about their daily lives without being confronted by some demonic maniac yelling Allahu Akhbar and going to meet his virgins. The difference is that Russia does not invade foreign lands and conduct a foreign policy which walks hand-in-hand with terrorism.

It comes as no surprise that the American Media wants to paint a dour, dismal and depressing picture of Sochi in particular and Russia in general. To inform their viewers and readers? Nope! To perform a media censorship, a puerile form of sub-journalism by little people trying to influence little minds by perpetuating the policy of trying to enhance the notion of “us” by creating an antagonistic and dangerous “them”.

How childish…as if anyone in the USA these days believes a word their media tell them anyway, given that most people have access to the Net and to places where they can read the truth, like Pravda.Ru.

Pravda.Ru