At Zoo Atlanta, Wise met Chantek, an orangutan who signs about 250 words and is tackling grammar. Chantek immediately learned to sign Wise's first name as an S on the forehead. Wise says he used that to trick him:

For an hour, as Chantek played Simon Says with his trainer, he would glance over at his new friend and sign "Steve." After his trainer rewarded him with a grape, Chantek signed "Steve" again, asking that Wise hand him a grape. When Wise reached into the cage, Chantek grabbed his finger and wouldn't let go until scolded.

Anthropologist Lynn Miles, who has worked with Chantek for 24 years, says he not only has emotions but also uses signs to label them. "The latest one he invented himself seems to mean 'annoyed,' " says Miles, of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. "But he also has signs for 'hurt,' 'good' and 'bad,' 'cry,' 'happy,' and he even says 'funny' when something's funny."

At Washington's National Zoo, orangutans given mirrors explore parts of their bodies they can't see otherwise, indicating a sense of self. Great apes regularly pass the mirror self-recognition test: A red dot is dabbed on the animal's face; when the subject looks in a mirror, reaching for the dot on its face instead of in the mirror indicates a sense of self.

When Chantek first passed it, he was at the same age as when a human child usually does. He proceeded to groom his teeth in the mirror and put on and adjust sunglasses. "He has some sense about how he wants to look to other people and to himself," says Miles.

Dolphins are a different animal altogether. But more than three decades of research, mostly at the University of Hawaii's Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory and its Dolphin Institute affiliate, have shown that dolphins solve problems, cooperate with humans in complex ways, distinguish sense from nonsense and imitate behavior. In social interactions, says Wise, they show a conceptual sense of self. And they can learn "gestural language," a dolphinized sign language they understand at a word per second.

The African elephant appears to be a cognitive step down from dolphins, says Wise, but still demonstrates highly evolved emotions, memory and learning ability, according to studies by noted elephant researcher Cynthia Moss at Amboseli National Park in Kenya.

Much less is known about dogs, complains Wise. "There's 60 million people out there who tell me their dog is like Einstein," he says, "but as far as work done to figure out what dogs think about, there's hardly any."

For those species, like dogs, that seem anecdotally to be advanced yet haven't been scientifically anointed, Wise gives the benefit of the doubt. Alex, the famed African gray parrot at MIT's Media Lab, has learned to identify shapes, colors and materials by name. He solves complex problems, uses symbols and is a deft imitator -- a trait some scientists link to self-awareness. He reasons, comprehends and calculates at the level of a 4- or 5-year-old human, the MIT scientists say. He also enunciates about 100 words -- and is learning to spell.

Wise tells the story about how Alex got his way one day when visitors were ignoring him. "Wanna nut," he spoke up. Nobody responded. Alex repeated emphatically, "Wanna nut!" No one paid attention. So Alex finally goes, "Wanna nut! Nnnn -- uhhhh -- tttt!" And everybody paid attention.

More Than 'Things'

Jane Goodall, the world's best-known primate researcher, calls Wise's first book -- "Rattling the Cage," published two years ago -- "the animals' Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and Universal Declaration of Rights all in one." His second, then, must be something like the Bill of Rights.

In an e-mail from London, Goodall says Wise's books are "profoundly important because they are written in a way that any person can easily understand why these magnificent animals deserve the basic protections of the law."

What Wise is calling for is basic "rights of bodily integrity and bodily liberty." This means the covered species would no longer be viewed by the law as "things," says Wise, who equates legal attitudes toward animals today with human enslavement in the antebellum South.

Legal rights would deliver animals from sanctioned abuse, such as when animals are held captive and used -- and sometimes abused -- for entertainment purposes at zoos and circuses. Medical labs could no longer test on any species granted rights.

Rights would offer animals more protection than current anti-cruelty laws, which are weak and unevenly enforced, Wise says.

He came to this conclusion after 25 years of courtroom experience, defending nearly 150 "dangerous dogs" on death row and trying to stop state-sponsored deer hunts and the U.S. Navy from using dolphins for suicide duty. He began representing animals in court in the late '70s after a chance reading of Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation," the bible of the modern animal rights movement. Before that, he says, "I had not realized how many animals we really brutalized."

By 1980, Wise started visiting slaughterhouses and biomedical labs. He became a vegetarian, stopped wearing leather. He redirected his Boston law practice from personal injury to animal rights, and since has been joined by his law partner and wife, Debra Slater-Wise. From 1984 to 1994 he served as president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. He has taught animal rights law at Harvard Law School, Vermont Law School and John Marshall Law School in Chicago.

"The early work I did in the 1980s," says Wise, "when I'd go into a courtroom and make an argument on behalf of a dog, people would just start laughing."

He observed that neither ethics nor compassion influenced judges in animal cases, thus the need for legal rights. Rather than argue for blanket coverage, he began to search for the species that have "practical autonomy." This would answer detractors "worried that any nonhuman animal could get legal rights," he says. "It's a 'slippery slope,' they say, and God knows where that ends."

He figured honeybees would fit neatly into the no-rights category. But combing through vast research, Wise discovered that honeybees "have the second most complex natural language after human beings." A sense of self? Benefit of the doubt. They're his bottom rung of animals deserving rights.

Besides, autonomy is just one factor, he says; what about the mainstream principle of equality? "You have an anencephalic child born with no brain and we give that child a whole panoply of rights," he says. "And you have animals like Alex who have complex and bright minds and they're treated like chairs."

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