The Nonhuman Rights Project is unlike any other organization in the world. We are the only group fighting for actual LEGAL rights for members of species other than our own.
Hundreds of organizations say they work for “animal rights.” But the only animal with legal rights is the human animal. No other animal has any rights at all.
In Western law, every nonhuman animal has always been regarded as a legal “thing.” Only humans are viewed as legal “persons.”
We begin by seeking two kinds of fundamental rights for our nonhuman plaintiffs: bodily liberty and bodily integrity. (Do not confuse these fundamental rights of nonhuman animals with so-called “human rights.”)
There are three criteria that determine how we select plaintiffs:
By the end of 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project will have launched the first in a series of lawsuits that demand that American state high courts do the following:
Steve Wise talks about proportionality rights for nonhuman animals – just as children and people who are deemed insane, for example, have rights that are proportional to their capabilities. (One of a series of interviews recorded by Gooseberry Productions.)
The remaining 61 “government-owned” chimpanzees slated to be retired from the New Iberia Research Center are going to have to wait until September before they are finally moved to their new home at Chimp Haven in Keithville, LA.
Two thousand years ago, the Greek scholar Aristotle developed the idea of the Great Chain of Being (scala natura) – a hierarchy of nature that starts with rocks at the bottom, and rises through plants to (nonhuman) animals to humans to angels to God. The Great Chain doesn’t hold up in the world of science, [...]
We humans aren’t the only ones who gesture wildly with our arms when we “talk,” or use a wide combination of ways to get the attention of someone else.
If you’re already outraged by what Lily Tomlin calls "the bizarre practice of caging wild animals for public display," the HBO documentary An Apology to Elephants won’t necessarily tell you a lot more than you already know. Still, it’s great to see the former star of Laugh-In not only as the narrator of this heart-touching [...]
Two recent studies from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany are allowing scientists to gain further insight into how chimpanzees view the world.