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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