Animal Rights Group Loses Michigan Supreme Court Bid to Free Chimpanzees From Zoo
Justice Elizabeth Welch would have granted review in light of scientific evidence that chimpanzees can “think, feel, love, grieve, and yearn.”
Michigan’s highest court has declined to revisit a ruling that will keep seven chimpanzees at a roadside zoo—over the objection of one justice who says the law needs to catch up with the science.
We began covering the case last year, when a three-judge panel of the Michigan state court of appeals denied a petition for habeas corpus filed on behalf of the chimps by the Nonhuman Rights Project, an animal rights advocacy group seeking their release from the DeYoung Family Zoo in Wallace, Michigan. The Michigan circuit court had summarily denied their request without a hearing, stating the alleged imprisoned chimpanzees were not “persons” eligible for habeas relief.
The Michigan Court of Appeals agreed.
“The chimpanzees are animals,” Judge Matthew Ackerman wrote on behalf of the panel. “[A]nd as the common law authorities all make clear, animals—including wild animals, such as these chimpanzees—are treated as property.”
Judge Ackerman traced the origins of the habeas remedy back to English common law, invoking Sir William Blackstone, who rooted man’s dominion over beast in the Creation narrative: “In the beginning of the world, we are informed by holy writ, the all-bountiful Creator gave to man ‘dominion over all the earth; and over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ . . . The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator.”
Undeterred, the animal rights group filed yet another appeal at the end of last year, urging the Michigan Supreme Court to reconsider the common law in light of modern science showing chimpanzees to be autonomous and intelligent, much like humans, sharing “close to 99% of our DNA.”
“Their interest in exercising their autonomy,” the group argued, “is as fundamental to them as it is to us.”
The state Supreme Court, however, would not entertain any of this. In its terse, one-line ruling denying leave to appeal last month, it simply stated it was “not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this Court.”
However, Justice Elizabeth Welch would have granted review, to consider “whether the common law understanding of habeas relief should evolve in light of our more advanced understanding of the animal kingdom.”
She questioned “whether an eighteenth-century British jurist’s interpretation of the Book of Genesis is a sound foundation for Michigan common law in the twenty-first century.”
Instead, she would have “explored whether our scientific understanding of chimpanzees should change our view of habeas relief,” noting “considerable evidence that chimpanzees can think, feel, love, grieve, and yearn.”
By this logic, though—once courts undertake to consider animals’ thoughts and feelings—what should be the limiting principle separating man from beast? Judge Ackerman anticipated exactly this problem in his earlier ruling, making clear that “[n]o exception exists for ‘intelligent’ animals, which in any event has no natural stopping point” [emphasis mine].
The Nonhuman Rights Project has filed similar lawsuits on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants kept in zoos in other states, including Tommy the chimp, one of whose cases Professor Jacobson wrote about here, and Happy the elephant. The Michigan Supreme Court ruling marks the latest in the group’s ongoing battle to free animals from their cages—a battle they have yet to win.
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No animal should be left to die slowly in squalid conditions
This is not the intent of Gods words
It’s not about chimps. Activists are targeting chimps because they’re trying to break new ground in common law.
They’re trying to convince a judge that an animal deserves human-like liberty rights (habeas corpus). Lawyers are trying to prove the animal possesses “autonomy”.
It’s much easier to present data from so called experts regarding the advanced cognitive and emotional depth of chimpanzees than for other animals at the zoo.
Bottom line: It’s all about the “Foot in the Door”. Activists deliberately choose chimps as their first legal clients. They think that if they can win legal rights for them, they can later expand protections to other species.
The same way those opposed to the right of a free citizen to bear arms attack the “scary looking” guns first — the foot in the door.
“The semiautomatic weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semiautomatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase that chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”
–JOSH SUGARMANN, VIOLENCE POLICY CENTER
Foot in the door or “Nose under the tent.”
Agreed, but what does that have to do with extending the laws of human to animals?
I’m curious what evidence you have that the animals in question are being left to die slowly in squalid conditions.
If there’s evidence of mistreatment or cruelty, I’d think the proper route would be animal cruelty charges, not suing to establish “personhood” for animals. That fact that they chose the latter path rather than the former is telling in my mind. I’d wager that any claims of animal cruelty and “squalor” are overblown and are simply a rationalization for the underlying cause of this group…to get a court, any court, to declare that animals are “persons” in the eyes of the law.
I just checked out the site of the “Nonhuman rights project” and their case against the Family Zoo is: They’re holding chimpanzees “prisoner” after the animals were transferred from other facilities that were closing (what we who actually care about the welfare of individual animals rather than some abstract concept of “personhood” would call “being rescued”). The complaints are that one of the chimpanzees died (with no indication of any type that the animal died of mistreatment or neglect), That the animals are kept inside in winter (I can’t possibly imagine why the zoo would keep animals who’s natural habitat is the equatorial tropics inside during the winter in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with average temperatures in the teens…I imagine if they let them out into the frigid winter weather, that would have been the complaint), that the animals were witnessed on leashes when being viewed by the public, and that some guy witnessed the animals acting agitated with no exploration as to what might have caused the agitation.
I’m not getting “cruelty” out of any of that.
Just out of curiosity: if animals are “persons” shouldn’t they have the right to vote? To own firearms? Do antidiscrimination laws regarding employment, education and public access apply to them? Do they qualify for welfare, SNAP, Social Security?
The entire premise is ridiculous and should be laughed out of court by the judiciary. Perhaps Judges should start levying Frivolous Lawsuit charges against this organization to get them to stop wasting the court’s time.
Michigan dems want to give them the right to vote after releasing them (into Detroit of course).
They also might run one for public office. After all a chimp is demonstratable much smarter than Kameltoe Harris or any of the other buffoons lusting to claim the 2028 democratic presidential nomination.
Hey.
It’s right there in The Plan, just like I said.
We’ve come a long way in terms of animal welfare. Education and public pressure has done a lot to improve the lives of animals in captivity. anthropomorphizing animals, however, can also cause them a lot of harm.
I blame Disney movies.
The best way to compel someone to treat an animal in a certain way is to successfully lobby for a law change.
Courts never should be creating brand new laws!
Can “Justice” Elizabeth Welch define what a woman is?
And yet, what is the common law? Habeas Corpus is a common law right, which means it was created by judges. So why is it unreasonable for judges to reconsider its scope?
Jeremy Bentham “Can they suffer?” is the big leftist sentence. A bad misunderstanding of animals, who have many more positive aspects that are downplayed.
Vicki Hearne on this
https://www.scribd.com/doc/294124577/Hearne-Whats-Wrong-With-Animal-Rights
I don’t have a problem with laws demanding humane treatment of captive animals. But they’re still animals and the courts should not even be allowed to rule otherwise.
PETA needs to be banned for all courts all the time. They are nuts!
Anyone who wants to give human rights to animals must be first forced to explain how human courts will subsequently be set up to handle claims BY animals against violence or predation by OTHER animals.
And if such a law is passed regardless, it is our duty to swamp the courts with such cases.
The statement that the chimps genome and the human genome are 99% alike is flat out false. The origin of that statement is premised on protein coding genes coding genes being alike and ignoring the rest of the genome. When the entire genome is taken into account, the percentage is more like 86%. I note that even if the 99% were true, then I would have to say that 1% difference is enough because the vast differences between the species. Which chimp can talk, compose poetry, build houses, think abstractly, launch rockets into outer space?
DW is obsessed with YT videos of dogs (and now cats) who “communicate” with their owners via floor-mounted buttons that represent words and concepts. Some of them are quite convincing. I suspect the cutting-room floor is littered higher than Kamala’s aspirations.
Paul Valery
London – tiger in the zoo – a superb animal, a head of formidable solemnity and that mask one knows, in which there is something Mongolian, regal force, potentiality, an occult look of power, of something that has gone past cruelty, fatality rather; the features of a truly absolute monarch at rest; bored, perilous, loaded : impossible to be more completely tiget than that.
Yet this splndid beast crosses, uncrosses, his limbs; from time to time one sees muscles flexing gently under that fulvous mantle streaked with black. The tail is alive. Is he aware of these far displacements? The beast is a sort of empire.
The “sparking-off” of local reflexes – must attempt to decipher the life locked within.
I was unable to stay longer to study this animal, the most beautiful tiger that I ahve seen ….
I think of “literature” in posse upon this subject … Of the images what would be searched for – but not by me : for I should seek to possess him as he is, in the livingness of impermanent form that his every act unforms, reforms, before turning him into letters.
Pendulary motion of wild beasts among the grills where their stripes rub the bars.
He opens his jaws. Yawns – presence and absence of the tiger’s soul, eternally waiting for something to happen.
The same:
The enormous beast lies pressed against the bard of his cage. In his immobility I cannot move. His beauty turns me to stone. I fall into a contemplation in front of this inscrutable animal person. In my mind I assemble the forms and forces of this magnificent pasha, wrapped in a robe so noble and lithe.
To all he surveys he brings an incurious eye. Artlessly I seed to read human attributes into his marvelous mask. I cling to that expression, as of a self-contained superiority, of power and indifference, that I find in the features of this absolute rule – a face strangely veiled, a spidery lace of black delicate arabesque scribbled upon its golden fur.
No fierceness : something altogether more formidable – an inexpressible certainty of being deadly.
What fullness, faultless egoism, sovereign isolation ! The immanence of all that he is worth is upon him. This creature makes me think vaguely of a great empire.
Impossible to be more oneself, more exactly armed, endowed, charged, instructed in all that concerns being perfectly tiger. Every appetite, temptation, finds its perfect instrument in him ready to hand.
I give him this motto : No Palaver.
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