New York Court: Chimps Are Still Property, Not People

Wise said then that chimpanzees, which are biologically similar to humans, are “autonomous and self-determining beings” and thus deserve similar legal rights.

The chimp-rights activists had argued that other non-human entities, namely corporations and partnerships, have previously been deemed “persons” for certain legal purposes, but “those entities are composed of humans, hence the legal fiction of personhood accorded them”, Jaffee wrote.

Thursday’s decision means that a pair of 8-year-old chimpanzees living in a research lab at Stony Brook University are not being unlawfully detained, as argued by the Nonhuman Rights Project, the now-losing side of the freakish case.

“Animals, including chimpanzees and other highly intelligent mammals, are considered as property under the law”.

The Nonhuman Rights Project wanted the two chimps, Hercules and Leo, to be given limited personhood rights, in the hope that they would be released from Stony Brook University on Long Island, where they are now being used in locomotion studies. And by law, “Persons have rights, duties, and obligations; things do not”.

Hercules and Leo, the research chimpanzees whom an animal rights group went to court to set free, will stay put because chimps aren’t “legal persons”, a New York judge ruled Thursday. The chimps are held by Stony Brook University. They don’t have any adults around.

The Nonhuman Rights Project has asked the state’s highest court to hear the two cases after they were dismissed by mid-level appeals courts over the past year.

Wise added that he does plan to appeal.

She even predicted that “some day [such campaigns] may even succeed”, because the status of “legal person” doesn’t necessarily equal “human being”.

In today’s ruling, Jaffe seems to express some sympathy for NhRP’s arguments. A chimpanzee is not entitled to the rights of a human and does not have to be freed by its owner, a New York appeals court ruled in December.

Bill Trojan /AP A 2014 photo shows Tommy, a chimpanzee, smiling at his home in Gloversville, New York.

“The decision … was correct, not only because it followed existing precedent, but because the entire project of seeking to confer legal rights on animals is misguided from the ground up”, writes Richard Epstein, a legal scholar at New York University (NYU) in New York City, in an email to ScienceInsider. “The Nonhuman Rights Project is in my view a diversion from the central question of what form of protections should be afforded by people to animals and why”.