This is the goal and hopeful outcome for chimps and all primates currently subsisting in substandard conditions around the country and the world in ill-equipped zoos, circuses and in roadside attractions as entertainment props. And being tortured in laboratory testing.
With researcher Dr. Goodall showing the world decades ago how chimps...as well as all primates and many other animals...are intelligent and emotional beings.
A friend saying thank you to Jane after being rescued from a concrete hell-hole.
And going back home.
Cecilia is a 35 year old chimpanzee that for decades of her life had been living in a concrete enclosure in the infamous Mendoza Zoo in Argentina. Just last year the decrepit zoo came under world condemnation after a legal case trying to move a polar bear to a more humane and suitable location elsewhere. The legal battle ended in the polar bears favor but he died before he could be transferred.
That is the case with a lot of the animals there.
Take Cecilia. After her two companions died, she had spent years listless, in a state of depression. Laying in the fetal position on concrete under a blanket.
Unable to ever see the sky.
And then, three years ago, she had a visitor. Pedro Pozas Terrados, executive director of the Great Ape Project, a huge primate sanctuary in Spain, who visited the Zoo after the pleading of hundreds of people.
He sat and watched. And witnessed. He ‘communicated’ with Cecilia in much the same way friend and cohort Jane Goodall also communicates with her primate friends.
So, with the assistance of The Association of Officials and Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA) they went to court to free Cecilia and to try to achieve something that has never been done.
To prove in a court of law that Cecilia should not be considered as an “object” but as a nonhuman person and allow her the same basic rights.
“We argued in court that the circumstances of Cecilia's confinement without companionship, and her environment so unnatural, that is was unlawful and that her health was deteriorating as a result,” said Terrados.
And in the historic and landmark decision...the first of it’s kind in the world...the judge, Judge Maria Alejandra of the Third Court in the state of Mendoza ruled that Cecilia was subject to non-human rights of health and happiness. “And that non humans indeed possess rights related to their animal essence."
And ordered her release, and to be transferred to the Great Ape Project's sanctuary in Brazil. And if she is deemed able to handle it, to be released in an open sanctuary.
In her verdict the judge went even further then the prosecution had hoped, and encompassed all the animals at the zoo.
“I request all members of the Mendoza Legislature to provide the relevant authorities with the necessary legal tools required to bring an end to the grave situation of captivity that sees the zoo animals living in unsuitable conditions. The African elephant, the Asian elephants, lions, tigers, brown bears, among others. And all of those exotic species that don’t belong in the geographical and climatic environment that is present in the province of Mendoza.
We’re not talking about civil rights enshrined in the Civil Code. We’re talking about the species’ own rights. Development. To life in their natural habitat.
It is not a question here of granting them the rights that human beings possess, but of accepting and understanding, once and for all, that these beings are sentient beings, who are subject to rights and who, among other things, assist them with the fundamental right to be born, live, grow, and die in the environment that is their own according to their species.”
In her closing words after the verdict, the judge quoted Buddha, Gandhi and then Immanuel Kant, when she said, "We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
Said an elated Terrados, "This is a landmark judgment, in which a judge has accepted for the first time in world judicial history a habeas corpus sentencing immediate transfer to our sanctuary in Brazil and with arguments supporting our struggle to consider the rights of apes. We hope it will encourage judges around the world to consider the rights of other non—human beings.
Cecilia has become the first chimpanzee as a representative of the Great Apes in which she is released thanks to a human legal instrument, achieving in this way the objective that from our international organization we work for all the great apes that are in captivity. This ruling and its arguments therein will serve as a precedent when filing new lawsuits and Habeas Corpus submissions. Argentine justice has advanced to the rest of the countries and has given them an important lesson in the protection and granting of rights to the great apes, considering them "nonhuman people" without anyone ripping their clothes for that reason, on the contrary, are proud of a sentence that implies a significant increase of human values directed to species as close to ours as the great apes that belong to our own family. Today Cecilia leaves the filthy cave where she has been living for many years to live in a place in better conditions and with members of the same species.”
Notes Veronica Chavez of One Green Planet, “Whether the ‘rights’ the judge refers to will be applicable to other chimpanzees and animals is yet to be seen, but recognizing that species have a right to develop in their natural habitat is a huge positive step. There is still a lot of work to be done if we hope to see a day where zoos no longer exist, but at the end of the day, the freedom of a chimpanzee, whatever the cause, is something worth celebrating.”
And celebrate, we will.