The Other Side

Support for legal standing for animals appears strong among the public. A survey last year conducted by the Zogby International polling company for the Chimpanzee Collaboratory, a group working to stop abuse of great apes, asked 1,217 adults: "How do you think chimpanzees should be treated under the United States legal system?" Twenty percent said chimpanzees should be "treated like property such as a car or furniture." But 51 percent said "similar to children with a guardian to look out for their interests" and 9 percent said "same as adults with all the same legal rights."

The legal profession is paying attention. When Wise started teaching animal rights law at Vermont Law School in 1990, it was the first course of its kind, he says. Today, there are more than 25. "All sorts of law professors have come out of the animal rights closet," says Wise. He drops two prominent names -- civil rights and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, whose new book includes a chapter on animal rights, and Harvard Law School's constitutional law authority Laurence Tribe, who is increasingly outspoken on animal rights.

"The ultimate point should be to recognize that many nonhuman species are more than things," says Tribe, ". . . and have interests that deserve to be taken into account in much the way that human interests do -- in much the same way, but not quite."

Of course, Wise's viewpoint still faces stiff opposition. His most vocal detractor in legal circles is Richard Posner, a U.S. appellate judge and a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Calling instead for more vigorous enforcement of existing laws, Posner says: "It just is not feasible to equate animals to humans. There are too many differences. Their needs and our relations to them are too different from the needs and our relations to human groups to warrant actually granting animals rights."

Tibor Machan, a philosopher and professor of business ethics at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who has written about the issue, argues that the criterion for rights is morality. "Such rights would only arise if animals developed into moral agents, which they haven't," he says. "Notice no one is expecting animals to be kind, compassionate, considerate of their own victims, stop being carnivorous if they are, and so forth. That's because the only moral animals are human beings."

The standard reproach from medical researchers: Virtually every major medical advance of the past century has come from animal testing. Says Frankie Trull, president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research, in Washington: "It is pretty easy to sit around a table and intellectualize about his stuff and talk about what you'd be willing to give up -- until you or somebody you care about is hit with some terrible disease."

Human Response

After fielding questions at Politics and Prose, Wise has drawn another line -- this one of people waiting for his autograph. For many in the audience, Wise was preaching to the choir. There was grad student Ryan Shapiro, a vegan volunteer at the D.C. group Compassion Over Killing, a D.C.-based animal rights group, who says Wise is "laying the building blocks that will abolish the enslaving of animals for human purposes."

And there was Kitty Block, a U.S. Humane Society animal rights lawyer, who says she likes Wise's navigation of the slippery slope: "Every time you ever try to work on any animal issue, people say, 'Then I can't swat a fly?' "

But there was also Rockville teacher Peter Markham, who had raised a skeptical question during the Q and A: "Should an adult chicken have more rights than a human embryo?"

After hedging -- "I haven't studied chickens" -- Wise says that if the chicken has more "appreciation for life" than the human embryo, then yes, the chicken should have more rights.

After hearing Wise out, Markham's more convinced: "I mean, he doesn't want to give earthworms rights. I agree, you got to make a start somewhere."

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