Beastly Behavior?

By a Washington Post Staff Writer - June 5, 2002; Page C01

Steven Wise leans to the lectern. "I don't see a difference between a chimpanzee," he states unequivocally, "and my 4 1/2-year-old son."

At Politics and Prose bookstore this warm Friday evening last month, it's a coffeehouse-activist audience of about 40 that's versed in animal rights rhetoric. They came to hear Wise make his controversial case for extending legal rights to some animals, the argument he lays out in his new book, "Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights."

Pallid, wearing a dark suit and a loosened tie, Wise looks Establishment. He is not a tree hugger, he is a lawyer. He's a professional at drawing hard lines. Now he is the latest luminary of an animal rights movement better known for starlets posing naked to protest furs than for lawyers arguing science. Some think the case he's taking nationwide may become one of the groundbreaking civil rights battles of the next generation.

In lawyerly fashion, Wise has buttressed his case with science's latest discoveries about animal cognition and behavior, most of it universally accepted, some controversial. If some species of "nonhuman animals" can be shown to be smarter, more aware, more humanlike than previously recognized, they arguably deserve legal rights, he says.

"Certain species are capable of complex emotions, can communicate using language, and have a sense of self," says Wise, "all characteristics that once defined humanity."

Some talking points: Chimps have complex social interactions. They use tools. Research by Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, among others, has shown that, even in the wild, they demonstrate an idea of the future and remember the past. They can count. And they can communicate in sign language at the level of a 3- or 4-year-old child.

"Chimps have 98.7 percent of DNA in common with humans," says Wise. "Both my son Christopher and your average adult chimpanzee obviously meet any minimum rational standard for entitlement to basic legal rights."

Consider Lucy, a 6-year-old chimpanzee legally kept as a pet and test subject. Smart and personable, Lucy learned American Sign Language. She greeted her human teacher every morning with a big hug and two cups of tea she made herself at the stove.

But acting "almost human" didn't protect Lucy as legal rights might have, says Wise. As often happens when aging chimps outlive their usefulness as study subjects or become hard to handle as pets, her owners sent Lucy to a chimp rehab center in Africa. Poachers shot and skinned her, and cut off her feet and hands as trophies.

Wise, a longtime animal rights lawyer from Needham, Mass., makes similar cases for eight other species who meet the standards of consciousness, some sense of self-awareness and ability to act intentionally: gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, African gray parrots, African elephants, dogs and honeybees.

He goes over more highlights: Gorilla and human DNA are 97.7 percent identical (most mammals' DNA is more than 90 percent comparable to humans). Gorillas use tools, solve problems, imitate, pretend, even use deception to get their way -- all characteristics of the human domain.

Wise visited Project Koko, operated since 1976 by the nonprofit Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, Calif., whose mission is to protect gorillas and explore interspecies communication. There he met 300-pound Koko, a remarkably conversant gorilla whose sign language skills surpass minimum levels for human fluency. Koko knows more than 1,000 signs, uses more than 500 regularly and understands several thousand English words.

On human IQ tests, Koko scores between 70 and 95 -- by human standards, slow but not retarded. She articulates emotions -- a human attribute increasingly shown in nonhuman animals in neurological and zoological research at Oxford and New York universities, among others.

Wise reports this conversation from the day after Koko bit a caretaker, and her trainer asked what she had done.

"Wrong wrong," Koko signed with her large dark fingers.

"What wrong?" her trainer signed back.

"Bite," signed Koko. "Sorry bite scratch."

"Why bite?"

"Because mad," signed Koko.

"Why mad?"

Koko signed, "Don't know."

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