Non-Human Rights Project Interview

[00:00:01]

Hi, welcome to the Great Charities podcast. Recently, we had a bit of animal welfare team and we have been speaking with organizations that are creating new delicious vegan recipes and all kinds of approaches to animal welfare. And today we have something a little bit different. I am here with Kevin Schneider, who is the executive director for Nonhuman Rights Project that work to secure fundamental rights for non-human animals to other ways like litigation, legislation and education. So today I am super excited to hear what I think would be a different twist on the animal welfare question. So, hi, Kevin. How are you?

[00:00:46]

Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me.

[00:00:48]

I’m so excited as to your show. So to begin with. How would you describe your organization and the calls that you do for someone that is not familiar with the project or the challenges that you’re facing?

[00:01:01]

Short So we hear a lot about this question of animal rights, but fundamentally when you really look at it, animals, at least in our current system, don’t have rights. Not only that, they don’t even have the capacity for rights. As far as the law is concerned, animals and their interests are essentially invisible. So the purpose of the Nonhuman Rights Project is to make the first break in that wall to have courts, legislatures begin to recognize that at least some species other than our own of animals can have at least one basic fundamental right that is truly recognized by the law.

[00:01:42]

But I haven’t actually thought of it in this way. So you’re saying that I can just do whatever I want with the animal and that wouldn’t be illegal?

[00:01:53]

So we do have rights, right? Well, so here’s the distinction between what we broadly call welfare, animal welfare and rights. So I think it’s it’s kind of a confusion in terms issue. A lot of people talk about rights in a somewhat haphazard way. Animals really don’t have rights. What they do have, thankfully, after hundreds of years of organizing and fighting and continues to go on are some protections. So you can’t cruelly treat an animal under some circumstances. You can’t kill an animal without a justification. So that’s really the rub, because inherent in the animal welfare paradigm is the idea that animals are things that they’re property. So that while we might have a duty to treat them within certain guidelines and limits, at the end of the day they are categorically less than us. They are things and we can own them. And a bigger problem is that even when you do have these laws on the books for welfare protections, things like the Endangered Species Act, Animal Welfare Act, they often have tons of loopholes in them so that a lot of animals aren’t even covered. And even those animals that are covered, it’s often very difficult to get the authorities to care enough really to bring a prosecution because a private individual can’t enforce a a cruelty law under most circumstances.

[00:03:27]

That’s starting to change a little bit. But so all of this says to us, you know, we have an increasing concern for animals. There’s a recognition that our fate and their fate is tied together in, you know, issues of climate change and related issues, deforestation. And yet the law seems somehow trapped in the past. It still seems to miss things. And indeed, our law, at least the English speaking world, the common law and many other legal systems follow this. You can only be a thing or a person, but being a person and the law has nothing to do with whether you’re human or not. It just makes a difference between whether a court can see you or not, whether you can have any rights. So under the common law, you know, for a very long time, corporations have been persons, ships have been persons, churches, nonprofit organizations. But even during that time, you had human beings that were not treated as person, as full persons, women, children, indigenous people, certainly slaves. These were treated very much as things as property.

[00:04:33]

And that seemed very natural. Back then. Absolutely. Do you think it’s going to be a similar shift in maybe 100, 200 years that people look back at the way we treat animals in the same way that we look back at slavery today?

[00:04:48]

I think so. And I think it fits with a lot of the. Of course, they’re different, right. I think it’s important to stress that we’re not making direct comparisons between these because we’re different species. Right. But fundamentally, the issue is is the same. And it’s also an issue that comes up with how we treat the planet. Right. It’s it’s a thing. It’s property. Even though rivers and streams and mountains really literally give us life, our law still treats them as things, although that is starting to change. So you have around the world is growing recognition from courts and legislatures that the natural world itself ought to be a person and have rights. And frankly, for us, that’s an important development, exciting development, because not only do we think it’s good for the planet, it also helps to make our point that being a person and having rights under our legal system, it doesn’t matter if you’re a human, it doesn’t even matter if you’re a biological entity. You can you can still have that right. It’s a legal fiction, as we call it. And it’s it’s an important one, because without it, we think you you just can’t have rights. And so the law can’t fix everything, of course. Right. But it does tie together a lot of society and economics and even philosophy and ideas of ethics. And it does a whole lot to form where society, you know, the shape of society and how we relate to to animals into the planet.

[00:06:20]

And in this case, I think the work to do is so important because these animals, of course, cannot speak up for himself. So there needs to be someone that is fighting for their rights on their behalf. So I imagine as someone listening that. OK. I guess changing this legal system, that seems like a daunting, overbearing task to maybe have an example of an approach you’ve had or a success that you’re proud of so far. So we can understand how this system can be changed. Absolutely.

[00:06:55]

So first, I’ll talk about our work in the states, but then I’ll give a brief example of how this is being taken even further faster outside of the US, which maybe doesn’t come as too much of a surprise to some folks listening. But in our own cases, they’ve been habeas corpus cases, which is this ancient legal device, English common law device, which essentially has been used to contest unjust confinement. So if someone is thrown in jail or finds himself in jail, they or someone acting on their behalf can file what’s called a writ of habeas corpus that goes to a judge. And the judge either says, you know, this is legal for this person to be there. They they’re in a debtor’s prison or they committed a crime or something, or they can say, wait a minute, I don’t think this is right. I’m going to order the person who is keeping these individual detained and have them explain and give me a legally justifiable reason why, justifiable reason why they should be detained. So the rub here is that. The law protects persons, and the same is true of habeas corpus. So part of the argument that we make is that the individual chimpanzee or elephant. Those are our cases so far that we’ve filed. We file habeas corpus cases on their behalf in New York and Connecticut so far. And we ask that an individual who is in a laboratory or a zoo or a circus kind of situation that much the way a human prisoner would be treated. If the court should determine are they being held against their will? Are they being held for no justifiable reason? But of course, they also have to find that this nonhuman animal can be a person, at least for the one purpose of this habeas corpus. This one right to liberty.

[00:08:46]

And for us, we don’t accept. So that I understand. Are you questioning that? Maybe it’s a similar thing to put an elephant in a sewer as it would be to put a person in prison.

[00:08:56]

Very much so. And we talk in those terms in our lawsuits because as lawyers, we feel that we have to use the building blocks that we have. We may not necessarily think it’s the ideal. It’s often far from the ideal in terms of what we our moral vision of the world. But as lawyers, we think we have to use the building blocks that the courts have given us rather than kind of go in and sort of extol our own virtues, which seems like it would be easier. But, you know, that’s not how our system works and we

respect that. We have to analogize to cases that the judges have seen before and can understand. Of course, that’s a big leap for them. And so another huge part of our cases is using cutting edge science that tells us now so much more than we used to know, for example, when some of the major animal welfare and protection laws were passed. They were done at a time when we knew a fraction of what we know about the cognition of these animals. You know, chimpanzees that can learn sign language and teach it to each other without human intervention, but also seeing what they do in their natural elements right in the wild and how elephants broke repeatedly come back to the same pile of bones year after year of their relatives and grieve over, stand in a circle and cry, and now appear to grieve over them and contemplate life and death. Write these things that we think make us human and unique are really.

[00:10:21]

Science is showing us not unique to humans, and so that it becomes part of the argument as well. So it’s based on the historical use. Habeas corpus has been used to transform human slaves and Native Americans and others from being legal things, being legal persons. And so we don’t say that these situations are the same. Of course they’re not. But as a legal analogy, we think it’s perfectly fit to say you’re depriving this individual of rights, even though. There they have a well, they they. They if when we learn to, you know why we can’t. Directly speak to them, right? We can very much draw from their actions, from their behavior. Indeed, sometimes there is a video on YouTube you can find of a captive chimpanzee, I believe a zoo in Europe somewhere and she’s signing to the people key out, key out, pointing at the, you know, the gate. And then they think it’s so funny. They don’t know what she’s saying. But for someone who actually understands what’s happening there, you have a chimpanzee who’s literally saying, let me out of here. And we think this is a powerful thing to show that. We we all broadly like animals, right? Most people consider themselves animal people, but at the same time, we’re really blind to so much of the suffering that happens in part because the science is new and we’re still coming to terms with what it means that we are not the only individuals on the planet that have a real sense of ourselves and no need rights that protects them.

[00:12:02]

I’m curious why I’ve chosen elephants and chimpanzees, because I’m sure you’re aware that most animals that are suffering are cows and pigs and chickens. And factory farming is the main reason because we feel more connected to this animal suit’s easier to get people involved. Some laws can change for animal rights and then maybe trickle down to the farm animals. Or is it because these animals are more intelligent? What is the biggest reason?

[00:12:28]

That’s a great question and very important question. So for us, the their intelligence, their similarity to us is is significant, but not morally significant. So we think that, again, this goes back to how we structure our cases. We build them around existing legal values. One of them being this notion of autonomy. And judges really care a lot about autonomy, which is basically freewill, your ability to choose how you want to live your life, and so much so that they seem to care even more about that than they do about protecting human life itself, which actually makes sense because liberty and you know, that is really the bedrock of our civilization, Western civilization in so many ways. So it makes sense that, you know, judges feel compelled to follow that. So we build our cases around. We ask first, what is the science around autonomy for different species. And the great apes. So that includes chimpanzees in both species of elephants. So African and Asian elephants and also cetaceans, but also African grey parrots. Their science keeps revealing more and more species that appear to fit the bill of autonomous meaning. You can really scientifically prove that they have, for example, a sense of their past present plans for their future. They have a will that can be thwarted. And that’s the sort of thing we think the law really has to care about if it takes itself seriously, if it takes what its self says as the law seriously. But that is not to say that that’s where the line that’s where it has to end. Again, his lawyer, lawyers trying to establish establish a very novel precedent. We think it’s important to put forward the best case possible. And that sometimes doesn’t jive with being a kind of philosophically pure case.

[00:14:21]

So I know, for example, myself, I was brought into this work in large part because of an awareness of the very large scale abuses that we inflict on animals and the need for that to change. But I’ve come to. Believe that at least for the time being, we’re better served by filing the kinds of cases that we are on, the kind of rights. And while those very large scale issues, I think require different approaches because there’s so many of them, for one thing, because most of the society still eats these animals, you’re dealing with a fundamentally different kind of political problem in a lot of ways.

[00:15:04]

Whereas with chimpanzees, elephants, orcas and others, there is so much science on them in ways that we think resonates with the existing values of the law, at least our western common law systems, autonomy and liberty. But also there’s not that many of them, at least in our country or really anywhere. They’re not native to the states. So you don’t you kind of avoid some hairy issues and they don’t have a high economic value in the way that cows and pigs chickens do. And you cannot lobby political lobby that would like to start them. We think so. But it’s certainly not the ending point. And we really strained to make this point very clear that our argument is that these this notion of autonomy, it’s not required for personhood. It’s not. There is no rule book out there that says what you have to have like a checklist or anything like that. You know, the process. Well, people often think of the laws, I think being a more solid object than it actually is. It’s much more influenced by social, philosophical, religious or other factors that come into play. And so. We we say that this notion of autonomy is sufficient, but not necessary. So you don’t have to. Fit this bill in order to have rights, but we think that because the law already claims to care about autonomy, if you are an autonomous being, it shouldn’t matter what your species is.

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That’s a good thing to think about. Exactly. We can think about other issues later. I have two more questions. And we’re starting to run out of time. So short answer. Do you have a picture behind you? With a chimpanzee? Where I can read the words, I’m looking the cage. If you’re watching this on YouTube quickly, what is that?

[00:16:55]

Yeah. Thank you. So that is actually the poster for the film. The documentary film about us that came out at the Sundance Festival in 2016. And then it was released on HBO, where you can still find it today. It was directed by two of the really original documentary filmmakers here in the states. D.A. Pennebaker and Chris haeju this. So they D.A. Pennebaker did the classic documentary on Bob Dylan in the 60s Don’t Look Back. He was in the White House with JFK. And then, you know, we were able to make contact with them a number of years ago, and they followed us beginning in around 2011 as we planned our first lawsuits ever. The first habeas corpus lawsuits ever demanded the recognition that a nonhuman animal could be a person, which we filed in New York in 2013. So the film, which was actually nominated for a news and documentary Emmy Award for Best Social Justice documentary, which was huge, was up there with documentaries about very serious human issues, racism, violence, war. And we think that’s where the culture is really going. And so for us, it’s been one more really good teaching tool that we can have out there in the world.

[00:18:22]

And yeah, I suggest everyone to get out of the cage on H B, oh, gosh, check it out. And we’re starting to run short on time. So if someone always engaged me myself, my favorite animal is the elephant. Someone wants to help out. Do something to help your cause. What can they do?

[00:18:42]

Definitely. So first, go to our Web site, Nonhuman Rights, Dawg. We’re on all the major social media channels, so you can find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We have an advocacy center on our Web site. We’re expanding that. So we will periodically, if you’re on our email list, send you relevant links to petitions that you can sign or other ways that you can get involved in and voice your support to decision makers about support for one of our campaigns or cases, but also for lawyers and activists outside of the US. We work with about a dozen countries. That’s becoming a major part of our work is is trying to lend whatever expertise we’ve been able to gather in our cases to groups who want to achieve a similar result in other countries. And we’re really encouraged to say that judges elsewhere outside the states are really embracing this and have even started to decide that the natural world and some non-human animals can actually be legal persons who have rights. And so we think this is this is happening and we encourage everyone to get involved. If you can if you can make a small donation, that’s amazing. That’s always appreciated. But also just to share the share the word with with your own connections and begin thinking about and speaking in these terms, because a lot of it is we’ve seen in the media over the years, they’ve they’ve definitely gotten better about talking about this notion of rights and personhood in a much more detailed and respectful way, which we think is a big part of the process as well.

[00:20:18]

Hmm. All right. Kemish, Nadia, thank you so much for speaking with us today. This was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.