I have often wondered when exactly would someone compare Chimpanzees to the previously 10 Supreme Court rulings, that turned corporations into people, and declare that indeed Chimps are one of us humans too. We have had creditable and reliable authority on this issue for as long as I can remember. You know, like Scalia, John Roberts and the usual suspects in that court.
The recent ruling by the high court in Hobby Lobby`s decision is the latest in a 200-year-long line of rulings giving businesses owned, which of course are things or corporations the same rights as humans.
So it comes as no surprise to me being a witness to a new break-through into the mind of the most knowledgeable person that has ever lived to tell her story about Chimpanzees, and why today, The Nonhuman Project filed a writ of habeas corpus demanding Tommy the Chimpanzee and other Chimps be granted personhood status and that they should be freed from their illegal restraints.
Fifty years ago Jane Goodall made one of the most important scientific observations of modern times in a remote African rainforest. She witnessed a creature, other than a human, in the act not just of using a tool but of making one. "It was hard for me to believe," she recalls. "At that time, it was thought that humans, and only humans, used and made tools. I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.
Jane Goodall with Tess a female
chimpanzee at the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee
Sanctuary north of Nairobi, 1997.
She came across a dark figure hunched over a termite nest. A large male chimpanzee was foraging for food. So she stopped and watched the animal through her binoculars as he carefully took a twig, bent it, stripped it of its leaves, and finally stuck it into the nest. Then he began to spoon termites into his mouth.
Goodall telegraphed her boss, the fossil-hunter Louis Leakey, with the news. His response has since become the stuff of scientific legend: "Now we must redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as humans."
Leakey was exaggerating but not by much. Certainly, there is little doubt about the importance of Goodall's discovery five decades ago. As the distinguished Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, this was "one of the great achievements of 20th-century scholarship".
Goodall's subsequent observations found that not only did Pan troglodytes – the chimpanzee – make and use tools but that our nearest evolutionary cousins embraced, hugged, and kissed each other. They experienced adolescence, developed powerful mother-and-child bonds, and used political chicanery to get what they wanted. They also made war, wiping out members of their own species with almost genocidal brutality on one occasion that was observed by Goodall.
Lawsuit Filed Today on Behalf of Chimpanzee Seeking Legal Personhood; (a must read article)
Tommy, a chimpanzee, who is being held
captive in a cage in a shed at a used trailer
lot in Gloversville.
What I find interesting in this new revelation leading to litigation on behalf of Chimpanzees is that I personally have witnessed humans, people being held in captivity in cages just as the language in this lawsuit purports is being practiced on these Chimps.
Tommy, as you can see in this caged-photo clearly amplifies the pain and sorrows that these creatures endure at the hands of their captors. It shows the inhumane conditions and possible health issues of these Chimpanzees that are now being challenged before the bar of justice.
On Monday Oct.2nd at 10.00 E.T., the Nonhuman Rights Project filed suit in Fulton County Court in the state of New York on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee, who is being held captive in a cage in a shed at a used trailer lot in Gloversville.
This is the first of three suits we are filing this week. The second will be filed on Tuesday in Niagara Falls on behalf of Kiko, a chimpanzee who is deaf and living in a private home. And the third will be filed on Thursday on behalf of Hercules and Leo, who are owned by a research center and are being used in locomotion experiments at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
The lawsuits ask the judge to grant the chimpanzees the right to bodily liberty and to order that they be moved to a sanctuary that’s part of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance (NAPSA), where they can live out their days with others of their kind in an environment as close to the wild as is possible in North America.
The legal cause of action that is being used in these and coming cases of privately owned Chimpanzees is the common law writ of habeas corpus, through which somebody who is being held captive, for example in prison, seeks relief by having a judge call upon his captors to show cause as to why they have the right to hold him.
More specifically, these suits are based on a case that was fought in England in 1772, when an American slave, James Somerset, who had been taken to London by his owner, escaped, was recaptured and was being held in chains on a ship that was about to set sail for the slave markets of Jamaica.
With help from a group of abolitionist attorneys, Somerset’s godparents filed a writ of habeas corpus on Somerset’s behalf in order to challenge Somerset’s classification as a legal thing, and the case went before the Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield. In what became one of the most important trials in Anglo-American history, Lord Mansfield ruled that Somerset was not a piece of property, but instead a legal person, and he set him free.
While I can understand Lord Mansfield`s ruling, "that Somerset was not a piece of property, but instead a legal person" it should not take a legal scholar to agree that indeed Somerset was a legal person. Because after all he was born a man..or something.
In the Chimps case however, the issue I believe is not whether Tommy the Chimpanzee is a legal person for the writ of Habeas Corpus to apply, but whether these Chimps are owned property or things in order for the criteria the U.S. Supreme court relies on to hold that "corporations are people" which obviously corporations are things; thus ordering personhood on these Chimps and order them freed.
Hmmm, these things I find in the internet blow my mind really. Maybe if a lawyer is in the house, this questions may be put up for discussion and cure my curiosity.
I found this story very interesting and decided to test the legal minds here in the communtiy. You can find much of these "Chimp`s " cases dating back for more than 20 years, when advocates begin doing research and preparing to bring what is today`s writs on behalf of not only Chimpanzees, but elephants and other animals being held captive by men. The links provided will help.
New York Times story here