The Case for Treating Animals as Humans

In the new documentary ‘Unlocking the Cage,’ attorney Steven Wise makes his case for why animals need legal personhood for their own safety.  Earlier this month, when Louisiana’s New Iberia Research Center, the world’s largest chimpanzee research facility, announced it was moving all 220 of its chimps to a sanctuary in Georgia, it’s a safe bet the news made attorney Steven Wise the happiest man on the planet. That’s because two of the chimps, Hercules and Leo, had been the subjects in an ongoing legal battle about the rights of chimps, a legal case brought by Wise, president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, and the subject of D.A. Pennebaker a Chris Hegedus’s Unlocking the Cage, a documentary out now in New York, followed by a national rollout and an HBO broadcast early next year.

http://tinyurl.com/zwlq8o2

Chimpanzee Representatives Argue for Animals' Rights in Court

Representatives for two chimpanzees argued before a New York judge on Wednesday, in the first hearing of its kind over their “personhood” rights and freedom from a research institution.  Steven Wise, the lead attorney for the Nonhuman Rights Project, the group arguing on behalf of the chimps, said that the apes are unlawfully imprisoned and that the court should relieve them. They are “autonomous and self-determining beings”, he argued, and therefore deserve the right to bodily liberty.

http://tinyurl.com/okuqo2w