A lawyer’s call of the wild

In the new documentary “Unlocking the Cage,” zealous animal rights attorney Steven M. Wise takes on the cases of Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees suffering through locomotion experiments at Stony Brook University in New York. “They had wires shoved into their muscles,” Wise, 65, said in a telephone interview from a zoo where he was checking on the fates of other chimps. “They were placed under general anesthesia every few weeks; they lived in cages; it was really a horror show.”

The movie also chronicles Wise’s efforts on behalf of Kiko, a chimpanzee imprisoned in a concrete-floor cage in a storefront in Niagara Falls, N.Y.; and Tommy, a chimpanzee the attorney discovered in 2103 in a rural New York facility that rented out reindeer for holiday events. In a decrepit warehouse on the property, Wise found Tommy locked in a cramped, dark cell.  His only company was a flickering TV set playing cartoons.

In “Unlocking the Cage,” which was made by famed documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Wise and his animal rights advocacy organization, the Nonhuman Rights Project, seek to relocate the four chimps to far more humane quarters at a large sanctuary with some 250 other chimpanzees in Florida.

But obstacles abound. “The problem is that all nonhuman animals are considered ‘things’ under the law, not persons, so these chimpanzees don’t have any legal rights,” Wise said. “And it’s very difficult to help a being that doesn’t have any rights.”

Existing animal welfare laws don’t work, because the statutes allow for chimpanzees to be kept in claustrophobic cages, Wise added.

So the attorney and his organization have gone where no lawyers have before.  They’ve developed groundbreaking legal arguments to free the chimps, arguing, based on scientific research, that the apes are “autonomous beings” and are enough like humans that they should be entitled to bodily liberty. “They’re conscious, self-conscious and know they have a self,” Wise said. “We don’t say they’re autonomous to the degree that adult humans are, but what they can decide is whether or not they want to live in a cage or in relative freedom with other chimpanzees.”

In Wise’s legal memo on behalf of Tommy, he outlines how “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; they suffer the pain of anticipating never-ending confinement.”

The documentary focuses on how Wise and his colleagues go to court to argue personhood status for the four chimpanzees, and then to sue the chimps’ captors under the writ of habeas corpus, or wrongful imprisonment.

It’s an unprecedented approach to animal law, and Wise doesn’t expect any miracles. “Ours is a 25-year plan,” he said. “This is war.”

Wise, who is gray-haired and bespectacled, grew up in a Reform Jewish home with dogs and cats in rural Maryland. But his work stems not so much from his love of animals as his passion for social justice.

After working as an activist protesting the Vietnam War in the 1970s, he became a lawyer and began his career as a criminal defense and personal injury attorney. But he changed his practice overnight after reading Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation” around 1980.

“It was an epiphany,” he recalled. “For the first time I realized just how much we were mistreating animals and that I was a part of it. I realized that there were no entities who more needed lawyers than nonhuman animals.

“Very shortly after that, I announced to my law partner that I was going to start representing [animals] instead of human beings,” he added. “At that point, my decision was considered to be very odd. I would walk into a courtroom and even judges or clerks would laugh. Some people even barked at me.”

Wise promptly became a vegetarian and, later, a vegan.

His early cases included defending dog owners whose canines had been sentenced to death for mauling humans. “I treated these like capital cases,” he said. Wise would bring in canine behaviorists who explained the psychology of a dog, as well as steps that could be taken by owners to curtail the pooch’s vicious behavior. He’s lost only a handful of the some 150 dog cases he has litigated over the past 30 years — and only because those owners were proven to be too irresponsible to help their pets. “But they didn’t kill my human clients; they killed the dog,” Wise said.

By 1995, Wise realized that the greatest obstacle to representing the interests of animals is that they are legally considered “things.” “That insight was really what started me on the road to founding the Nonhuman Rights Project,” he said. “The goal was to figure out how to argue successfully that some nonhuman animals should actually be declared legal persons.”

Wise spent years meticulously researching the history of general law, dating back to the ancient Hebrews, Greeks and Babylonians, as well as the laws once governing slaves throughout the world.

He decided to focus, at first, on the rights of highly cognitive animals, such as dolphins, elephants and great apes, because of their similarity to humans. 

“So if a judge does not allow a nonhuman client to be a person for the sake of habeas corpus and freedom, then that judge is violating fundamental principles of equality and liberty,” Wise said. “It’s not an appropriate ending for a case to simply permit the imprisonment of an autonomous being.”

For his efforts, Wise was profiled on the cover of a 2014 issue of The New York Times Magazine and taught the first-ever animal law class at Harvard Law School. Filmmakers Pennebaker and Hegedus agreed to make a documentary about his work practically on the spot when Wise pitched them the idea for the movie several years ago. 

“We didn’t know much about the animal rights movement, but we knew that the way animals were being treated was wrong,” Hegedus said in an email.  “So when we met Steve Wise and he told us that he was intending to go into a court and argue that an animal, such as a chimpanzee, has the capacity to be a legal person we were intrigued.”

“In our [documentaries], such as ‘Don’t Look Back,’ with Bob Dylan, and ‘The War Room,’ on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, we look for subjects who are passionate and taking a risk to pursue a life goal,” Pennebaker wrote in an email. “It was obvious that Steve Wise was exactly that kind of person. And importantly, Steve was about to begin his quest and as storytellers that’s exactly where we want to start.”

“Unlocking the Cage” shows how Wise and his team secured a significant victory last year when a judge required Stony Brook University lawyers to appear in court and give the judge a good reason as to why they were imprisoning Hercules and Leo. Wise ultimately did not prevail in achieving freedom for the chimps under the writ of habeas corpus. But the case was nevertheless “a landmark,” he said.  The animals got their day in court. “They were treated the way human beings are treated when someone says they’re being imprisoned against their will,” he said. “It’s just one step in knocking down the legal wall that exists between humans and [animals].”

“Unlocking the Cage” opens June 24 in Los Angeles.  

Naomi Pfefferman is the arts and entertainment editor at the Jewish Journal.