00:00:59.860The silence is broken by somebody crying, trying to be heard, never a word.
00:01:08.080Always the attitude, sort out your own, always alone.
00:01:13.600Wishing for something the world is denying.
00:01:18.260Out in the wilderness somebody's crying.
00:01:29.860Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with Kevin
00:01:37.620Schneider. Kevin is an attorney and the executive director of the Non-Human Rights Project.
00:01:43.740Founded in 1996 by attorney Stephen M. Wise, the Non-Human Rights Project works to secure
00:01:49.820legally recognized fundamental rights for non-human animals through litigation, advocacy,
00:01:55.280and education. Our mission is to change the legal status of at least some non-human animals from
00:02:01.740mere things which lack the capacity to possess any legal right to persons who possesses such
00:02:08.980fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty and those other legal rights to which
00:02:14.280evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them.
00:02:20.380Our current plaintiffs are members of species who have been scientifically proven to be
00:02:24.900autonomous, currently great apes, elephants, dolphins, and whales. We are working with teams
00:02:30.220of fraternities on four continents to develop campaigns to achieve legal rights for non-human0.88
00:02:34.680animals that are suited to the legal systems of these countries. Wow. Well, welcome to For the0.54
00:02:41.400Wild, Kevin. And thank you for all the work that you are doing in unraveling the threads of human
00:02:48.300supremacy and working for the autonomous livelihoods of our more than human kin.
00:02:53.080Well, thank you so much for having me. And I was actually taken aback just now how you described it. I think that's a beautiful way of putting it, unraveling the threads. And so thank you so much for having me.
00:03:05.060Yeah. Yeah. Unraveling the threads of human supremacy is definitely probably our favorite pastime here at For the Wild. So, yeah, I'm excited for this conversation. And, you know, just to jump right in, since 2013, the Non-Human Rights Project has filed lawsuits on behalf of animals in captivity, including four chimpanzees and three elephants.
00:03:27.580So can you begin by sharing about the process that is taking place in the fight to secure these legal rights?
00:03:34.880And perhaps the second part of that question is, what strategies are utilized in your long-term litigation campaign to grant personhood to our more than human kin?
00:03:44.880It's a great question, and thank you again.
00:03:47.140So in a nutshell, I'll try to avoid too much legal jargon as much as I can.
00:03:53.040And really, I think we can, because the essence, I like to think of what we are arguing about, is really rather simple.
00:04:00.820Of course, then you get into the many other factors, human supremacy, and certainly just our history, our culture, religion, philosophy.
00:04:12.380But to go to the beginning, and why we focus on this, and why we see the need for what you refer to as legal personhood.
00:04:22.360So just from the outset, I think it's important to point out for folks who maybe have never heard of this concept before or have not really spent a lot of time thinking about it.
00:04:32.580So a person in the law is not a biological concept.
00:04:39.640And that's why, for example, it's always made sense legally for corporations to be legal persons.
00:04:47.380But I should also say that corporations includes nonprofits, right?
00:04:50.200So nonprofits actually benefit from that as well. Of course, we know there are lots of issues relating to kind of corporate personhood and some abuses of that. But the fundamental is, I think, actually rather sound that the legal imagination can essentially give legal weight to these entities that are out there in the world.
00:05:11.680And, of course, for much of our history, sadly, you know, that personhood being non-biological, right, it goes both ways because it's only relatively recently that every human being in the world is a legal person.
00:05:25.860So if we go back 100, 200, 300 years, certainly slaves were categorically treated as things and brutally so, but also women and children and indigenous peoples were all at one time treated as less than persons in one way or another.
00:05:45.380And then often with quite brutal results, because indeed, when you are not a legal person, there's only one other category as we see it.
00:05:54.860And as we understand Western law, there's some quibbles about this.0.58
00:05:58.640And I'm here actually right now in Finland with a bunch of other animal lawyers from all over the world and had a very productive and good exchange of ideas.0.51
00:06:08.060From our perspective, you can either be a person or you can be a thing.
00:06:11.080And being a thing is not a good place to be if you are a sensitive, sentient being.
00:06:17.080And to go further, you know, as to why this is really quite important is because in courts, you know, we try to bring to the attention of the courts these injustices, right, that say our chimpanzee or elephant clients are confined and held as property really and used for all kinds of money making endeavors like any other kind of piece of property would be.
00:06:45.500and being things, they're invisible to our legal system. So we can go into court and seek to
00:06:51.300advocate on their behalf. But in a very real way, the judge is going to be blind to them because
00:06:57.560they are things. It would be equivalent, although a lot of people don't kind of like to admit the
00:07:04.480kind of full reality of it. It's much like trying to file a lawsuit on behalf of a pencil or a book
00:07:12.280or your phone. And I think obviously, you know, people can see that as somewhat absurd. But I
00:07:17.980think it's equally absurd that you can have a chimpanzee, an elephant, an orca, really any animal
00:07:23.780be considered a legal thing to be bought and sold. And, you know, within some limits,
00:07:31.900welfare and other things to be killed at the will of their owner or in a conflict with a human,
00:07:38.940Right. And so the situation we have now is every human being in the world is a person.
00:07:45.180That doesn't mean that there aren't still widespread rights abuses of human beings.
00:07:50.980Of course, that's still a very big problem all over the world.
00:07:54.200But that fundamental first step has been taken.
00:07:58.000And once you have personhood, you can then begin going about the process of saying, well, what rights are appropriate for this person or this class of persons?
00:08:07.140I think the other important thing to recognize about personhood is that it doesn't convey, you know, the whole suite of human rights, again, using corporations as an example.
00:08:19.100You know, they can sign contracts, they can sue, they can be sued, they can own property, sell property, do all these rather socially useful things, but they nonetheless can't vote or marry or drive.
00:08:30.220That should be pretty obvious, but it still stands for this important principle that simply
00:08:36.660being a legal person doesn't automatically entail all of these other rights.
00:08:41.020And I think that's important because the rights that we're seeking in our lawsuits for chimpanzees
00:08:46.180and now elephants and soon other species as well, which we can talk about, are what we
00:08:51.320consider very fundamental rights, liberty, or as you put it there, autonomy.
00:08:55.480We can talk a little bit more about autonomy and why it's so important to our cases.
00:09:00.220And so we're not, you know, we're not looking at, you know, a broad array of rights. What we're saying is that we go to courts and we say, look, your honor, this chimpanzee is an autonomous being. He or she has an interest in her autonomy. And that's really her free will.
00:09:14.800You know, science has demonstrated beyond a doubt that we are not the only species who have an interest in our freedom.
00:09:22.740And I think for a long time this was written off as anthropomorphizing or, you know, somehow other doing bad science.
00:09:29.500But, you know, thanks to folks like Jane Goodall, who's on the board of the Non-Human Rights Project and has been for decades.
00:09:36.360You know, we're now in a position where we can say no.
00:09:38.400actually to deny that much of what goes on inside the minds of these animals is very much similar
00:09:45.300to us. You know, to deny that is actually committing, you know, the great scientific
00:09:50.020sin at this point, because to do that, you have to do a lot of mental gymnastics. And I think a
00:09:54.640great example is someone looks at elephants who will grieve, right? So in the wild, when a member
00:10:01.440of their pack, their family dies, their herd, they will routinely, and this has been observed,
00:10:06.940come back year after year after year to the bones of their dead relatives and go to them in these
00:10:13.600solemn, you know, gatherings and pick up the bones and have even been observed what we would call
00:10:18.900crying. You know, maybe a scientist would quibble with the description of all that, but to be able
00:10:24.620to look at that and say that they are not grieving in a way that is fundamentally the same as the way
00:10:29.440we do, I think requires just, you know, an active degree of blindness really to the world.
00:10:37.900And so we amass all of this stuff, right? We are putting all of this in front of the legal
00:10:44.140arguments, the scientific arguments, the, not so much the moral arguments, but they're there.
00:10:48.860I mean, the courtrooms are, morality is obvious. Sometimes it's very much absent, but, you know,
00:10:54.680it is certainly a part of our arguments as well. And to go back to this, this idea of autonomy,
00:11:01.580it is a very valuable thing. And I think it's something that people can identify with very
00:11:06.600viscerally. And even anyone who's interacted with an animal and seen or a child or anybody,
00:11:11.900when you seek to deprive somebody's free movement and free will, they will typically respond pretty
00:11:18.200harshly and pretty quickly. Say, if you want to grab your cat and she doesn't want that,
00:11:22.540she might scratch you. And that's, you know, a way of saying, you're depriving my autonomy. Stop.
00:11:27.880She wouldn't put it in those terms, but that's essentially what's happening. And so, of course,
00:11:33.540autonomy is this fairly graspable, pretty obvious thing. But the reason we argue about it is not
00:11:40.240because of those reasons, but rather because the legal system for hundreds of years has held up
00:11:46.640our autonomy as such a bedrock, fundamental legal interest that we as lawyers being, I hope,
00:11:55.280good lawyers, we then take what the courts say the law is and apply it to our case. And so we're not
00:12:01.260going in and saying, judge, please, we beg you, be nice to the animals. Of course, you know,
00:12:07.220it's kind of what is in my heart in a certain sense. But as a lawyer, what we're doing is far
00:12:12.220more powerful than that, really, because we're taking the arguments that they and the things
00:12:16.460that they claim to value and believe in, and essentially using them against the system
00:12:21.300itself. Because if we claim that we do value autonomy as much as we do, and now that it
00:12:29.140is beyond doubt that there are other autonomous beings in the world who have their own cultures
00:12:33.500and their own interests and their own families, their own histories, to simply throw that
00:12:40.660out and say that it doesn't merit any serious legal consideration, and indeed personhood,
00:12:47.620that that is to really, what you might say, throw the baby out with the bathwater,
00:12:51.480because it would be to reject the fundamental underpinnings of our liberal Western democracies.
00:12:59.840And so much of that starts with autonomy. And autonomy is even more, is relevant in another
00:13:05.920way, because autonomy is at the heart of what's called habeas corpus. So without getting into too
00:13:12.100much of the jargon, habeas corpus is an ancient legal vehicle, we call it, which is just a way
00:13:17.780to get into court and make an argument, because you need that. You can't just show up to court
00:13:22.600and say, hey, judge, I want to chat with you. You need to have either a statute or some kind of rule
00:13:27.820that gives you a way into court. And so habeas corpus, what that means is it's Latin for produce
00:13:35.260the body. It's been around since probably the 13th century, uh, or around then. And what it
00:13:41.900means and what it's used for is to test the legality of any confinement and historically
00:13:47.240human confinement. So say you find yourself, uh, maybe in a debtor's prison and you're in medieval,
00:13:53.200you know, Europe, and you believe that it's unjustified. It's wrong. You paid that debt.
00:13:59.340Well, you can have somebody or you can have a petition filed or have it filed on your behalf, a habeas petition, and that goes to a judge and a judge will review it because that's a very serious thing. And indeed, it is the bedrock, the oldest, you know, the kind of foundation of the Western liberal order, liberal in the sense of the kind of classical sense, not the kind of modern political sense.
00:14:23.800And so with this notion of, you know, autonomy and being so protected and so important, again, we come with the science and say, you know, here's your honor as another autonomous being.
00:14:37.380But even more to the point with habeas corpus, it has a history of actually being used to transform legal things into legal persons.
00:14:46.840And so in the 1780s, there was a famous case in England, the Somerset case, and that was the first time that a judge declared in response to a habeas petition that a human slave who walked into court as a thing was, in fact, a legal person.
00:15:04.700And so that actually many people point to that as one of the key changes that led to the beginning of the end of human slavery in England and then in the United States, because indeed we take in the U.S., we get our common law and so much of our law from England, of course.
00:15:22.380And and so this the Somerset case I mentioned is part of the common law of much of the United States and certainly New York and Connecticut, where we have our first lawsuits.
00:15:32.600And so we that gets kind of added to this mass. Right. So we say, you know, Your Honor, there's a there's there's a roadmap of sorts that's been laid out.
00:15:42.240Of course, we're not comparing the conditions of slavery, human slavery to to to what happens with our clients.
00:15:48.680But the fundamental point there is completely sound that, again, you have a legal thing that in all rights ought to be a legal person with, again, at least the capacity for at least one right.
00:16:05.200at least this. And again, we would say that that fundamental right being the right to their
00:16:10.560liberty, their freedom, their autonomy. And so armed with all of this, we go into court. We've
00:16:16.140been in court in New York since 2013. We've gone up and down the appeals process. I can go into a
00:16:23.200little more detail about that. And since late last year, we've been litigating in Connecticut as well
00:16:29.140on behalf of three elephants. So there are four chimpanzees in New York and so far three elephants
00:16:34.680in Connecticut. And we've had, you know, a lot of, say, fits and starts, a lot of obstacles thrown
00:16:40.280in our way, particularly in New York, just because we've been there, you know, for almost five years
00:16:44.460now. And, you know, in the course of all of that, we've seen judges really come very close to
00:16:51.640granting and endorsing our view and our argument. We've also had judges react the complete opposite
00:16:58.220way. And while they don't come out and say, you guys are, you know, terrible and wrong for trying
00:17:03.820to do this, they do say that personhood and rights are restricted to the human species. And so for
00:17:11.220folks familiar with the philosophy of this stuff, this is about as pure a speciesist statement as
00:17:16.500one can find. Indeed, in our last appeal in New York that we can talk a little bit more, at the
00:17:23.960mid-level, you know, the second court to hear that particular case, they came right out and said it
00:17:28.840finally that, you know, this chimpanzee doesn't get rights because he's not a member of the human
00:17:33.460moral community and you know this just raises all kinds of problems so much so that in response to
00:17:41.460that and some of these other rulings we went and so we always you know commission and ask experts
00:17:47.940i shouldn't say commission ask experts to submit briefs to the court they're called amicus curi
00:17:53.860briefs which is again latin for a friend of the court and so they're not a party to the case but
00:17:59.460but they can still add their thoughts, any kind of research, evidence, any basically things that
00:18:05.760the parties might otherwise not be prepared to introduce, but are nonetheless important.
00:18:11.360So among those briefs that we had filed in our New York chimpanzee rights cases
00:18:15.260was a brief by 17 philosophers all throughout the U.S. and Canada. And for one, I mean,
00:18:23.120from the outset, I think we were just extremely happy and thrilled that we got
00:18:28.720all of these very smart people to agree to one thing, you know, 17 philosophers with quite
00:18:34.640diverse views, you know, all interested in animal ethics. But nonetheless, you know, they still
00:18:40.660made a very resounding argument in favor of personhood for chimpanzees and, you know,
00:18:46.480went through all these, you know, very weighty philosophical reasons why it's irrational and
00:18:53.180wrong to restrict legal personhood and rights to human beings or somehow make the capacity for
00:19:00.420personhood be contingent on your species. It's the sort of thing that sounds like, I think,
00:19:06.940to an uneducated ear, it might make some sense. So they can't take on duties. They can't vote.
00:19:11.920They can't be held accountable for their actions. Therefore, why would we give them rights? But if
00:19:15.960you really think through the ramifications, that's a really dangerous idea, not least because
00:19:21.100we have many humans among us who don't fit the category, you know, fit the description of being
00:19:27.540autonomous. Children, you know, anyone with a mental disability or certain mental disabilities
00:19:32.560or someone with Alzheimer's disease. These are not people who are autonomous in the sense that
00:19:38.080they can really navigate the world and survive the world on their own. And nonetheless, we don't say
00:19:43.860they're not persons, of course, um, they still are entitled to dignity and, you know, their rights
00:19:50.580as, as persons. And so we have, you know, hit a few walls on the way, but that's to be completely
00:19:58.520expected. We are trying to change a status quo that has existed in the world for at least 2000
00:20:05.600years. The idea of, of splitting the world up into things and persons and having animals categorically
00:20:11.600be things, goes back to Roman times. And we've been really living with that and the ramifications
00:20:18.300of it ever since. And so it's not surprising to us at all that the courts haven't just
00:20:23.040kind of rolled over and given us what we wanted. But we have seen really now we're actually in
00:20:30.980just the last six months, we are starting to see some real cracks in the facade such that
00:20:37.800We are now having, for example, back in May, one of the high, so the highest court in New York is called the Court of Appeals. And one of the judges on that court, who is one of the most powerful judges in the state of New York, which is itself an influential state and powerful state, important state.
00:20:56.400He came out and said that he came very close to granting us, you know, endorsing and agreeing with our arguments because of some procedural matters that are sort of a little less interesting.
00:21:08.940We didn't actually we haven't actually broken through yet, but it's becoming it's very clear that we're getting to the point where, you know, we've essentially we've painted the legal system into a corner and that's by design.
00:21:23.520It goes back to using their arguments in a certain way against them and advancing our arguments.
00:21:31.180And I think we're starting to, I don't think, I know, we are finally starting to see the outcomes of that.
00:26:49.600It's a very kind of detailed statutory codes.
00:26:52.620But the judges in those countries are really almost take on more of a ministerial function
00:26:57.140in a sense. They're really just literally applying the law. I shouldn't say ministerial,
00:27:02.600but they're really just applying the law as written. Whereas in the U.S. and other common
00:27:08.040law countries, you do still have some areas where you can get into this common law. So what we have
00:27:15.180in the U.S. though is, and since for now it's been about 125 years, you have to go back to a
00:27:21.940a case, the Santa Clara Railroad case, or Santa Clara versus Union Pacific. I forget the exact
00:27:28.940name of it, but in the late, in the 1890s, the Supreme Court had a case involving, you know,
00:27:34.640a railroad that, I don't even know the facts, but essentially the railroad wanted to have,
00:27:39.960as a person, wanted to have the protection of the federal constitution. And without even really,
00:27:47.560without any discussion or analysis, what the Supreme Court did there back in the 1890s
00:27:54.440was they almost by a slight, it really was a slight of hand, they took this idea of a corporation
00:28:01.000being a common law person and then just transformed it into giving them rights under the U.S.
00:28:08.000Constitution and specifically the 14th Amendment due process clause. And I can imagine the kind of
00:28:14.420railroad lawyers, mercenary types, probably getting a huge kick out of the fact that they
00:28:19.600took a constitutional provision designed to help freed slaves and had it subverted and turned into
00:28:27.800something to advance corporate interests. It's a huge, and it's had obviously a very, in a lot of
00:28:34.020ways, destructive legacy. And I think it's actually something that really does urgently need to be
00:28:40.160addressed. But if we go back, this fundamental idea of a corporation or any business or any
00:28:46.460association, it can even be nonprofits or clubs or guilds or almost anything you can imagine where
00:28:53.260it's an association of people, they have been classed as, quote, persons for hundreds of years.
00:29:01.660And it's something that goes back again to English common law. And the reason why I would argue that
00:29:06.540it's at least, you know, theoretically at its base, a quite useful thing. If you think about,
00:29:11.900you know, say you want to start a business or you want to, you know, kind of do anything,
00:29:16.360you would set it up. But, you know, what happens if you get sick, if you die, if things go wrong,
00:29:22.980if there's no, if the whole enterprise is tied to you, and it could very easily just cease to
00:29:28.720exist it could disappear it could fall apart but by giving this legal shell to these to these you
00:29:36.660know entities quote unquote that we've corporations as a as an abstract you know kind of thing by
00:29:42.680doing that we make it possible to and again this is a really like a feat of the legal imagination
00:29:47.780somewhat in a lot of ways somewhat similar to what we are trying to do because it it takes this
00:29:55.300this idea of a human being, right, and applies it to really something rather different. And by
00:30:02.300doing so, again, you can have this entity, this corporate person, quote unquote. And, you know,
00:30:07.700and I should also say that it's pretty rare that they're even referred to in those terms. That's
00:30:11.400only relevant for us because, again, only persons can have rights. And for the vast majority of
00:30:16.300cases, you know, the concept of personhood just doesn't come up. Because while it does seem or
00:30:22.700I think oftentimes when folks are thinking about or learning about the law, there is this tendency
00:30:29.820to assume or believe that there's, that someone kind of sat down and really thought about it at
00:30:35.940one point. But particularly when you look at the common law, it accretes over time. And there's a
00:30:41.980lot of like messy wrinkles in this, you know, kind of tapestry that we've been building for the last,
00:30:46.860hundreds of years. And so this is not where we look to for purity or for any of that. It's really
00:30:56.820just the, again, and I think it kind of has a beauty to it in the sense that the common law
00:31:03.400recognizes that history and precedent and past human experience does matter, and it does inform
00:31:09.800current situations, and we should learn from our mistakes. But it's also, I think, a recognition
00:31:14.640that we don't have it all figured out. And that's really the beauty of the common law is that it is
00:31:19.360able to do things like expand and say, hey, this human being that you're treating as property,
00:31:25.620well, you know, the common law just says that can't happen. And the common law then becomes this,
00:31:30.540you know, tool for really advancing justice. And so, yeah, I hope that wasn't, you know, too much,
00:31:36.160but, you know, in thinking about it, you know, theoretical matter, you know, and again, you know,
00:31:41.260nonprofits are corporations. And so that means that we enjoy First Amendment protection. We
00:31:48.600there's all these like structural things that it actually does make sense. But with the caveat that,
00:31:55.800you know, having constitutional rights, it does in Citizens United, things like that. It has gone
00:32:02.220really off the rails for sure, in my opinion. Yeah. And I think I think that perhaps there
00:32:09.640were good intentions when putting perhaps you know I I kind of almost doubt that that there
00:32:15.560were good intentions in putting these systems legal systems into place because really if we
00:32:21.900did a tally mark of who the legal system is protecting it's not the majority of humans
00:32:29.400or species more than human species and so I I don't personally think that corporations whether
00:32:38.500it's a non-profit or extreme oil resource extraction company whether it's either of those
00:32:44.860two extremes of corporations i don't think that personally that they should be considered persons
00:32:50.000they're not persons but i i see how you're talking about it in terms of the legal framework
00:32:55.740i think it's also interesting how in the legal system things are somehow viewed as objective
00:33:02.400when I don't actually believe in objectivity, because objectivity, again, is thinking. It's
00:33:08.360thinking objects. What is an object? I mean, this is all created off somebody's or a group of
00:33:14.000people's mindset. This isn't law. Law to who? It's not the law of the land. It's not the law of the
00:33:20.740way the actual natural world functions. So, you know, it really gets me fired up in this way of
00:33:27.820just being frustrated, but also being extremely intellectually interested in understanding
00:33:34.080these systems. Because, you know, if I was kind of standing back as some type of anthropologist
00:33:39.800looking into our legal system, I could be interested when I look at it as a human living
00:33:46.120being who really cares about what's happening to the earth. It's so frustrating. And I've seen
00:33:50.100case after case after case that's just been, gosh, just really, really ridiculous outcomes
00:33:57.400that somehow our legal system protects these outcomes. Because like I said, when you really
00:34:03.560tally up who is the legal system protecting, it's usually not the indigenous people. It's usually0.99
00:34:09.960not the people of color. It's usually not the people who have been most oppressed. It's not
00:34:13.700the animals. It's not the land. It's not the rivers. It's not the mountains. It's not climate
00:34:18.500change. It's not it's none of those things. So that's that's just where I'm coming from. But
00:34:22.860I have so many thoughts and questions to ask you that I want to, like I said, to pull myself out
00:34:28.560of that wormhole. I would just say, though, just briefly, if I could, that when you talk about
00:34:34.060intentions, I think I don't even look to that because, again, to me, this is it's a blooming,
00:34:41.040buzzing confusion. I think so often we think we know more than we do. And that's, of course,
00:34:48.440a real problem. But I also think that, yeah, like you said, the law is very often used as a tool to
00:34:55.620oppress. And personhood, again, is a perfect or has been an example of that. So while it's very
00:35:01.880ironic now for us to see in some of our cases, you know, judges hold up this notion of personhood
00:35:07.100as if it's like a kumbaya, we're all in the human moral community, when a cursory review of the
00:35:13.100history of personhood shows that for the vast majority of the time, it was you're either in
00:35:17.280the club, which was largely you're a white man and a landed landowning white man, or you're not in
00:35:23.780the club, which is everyone else. And in that way, I think the law at its kind of worst can
00:35:29.600can simply be a reflection of existing power imbalances and unfairness. But I think in the
00:35:36.580face of that. And, you know, certainly being a little bit cynical and weary of it, for sure. But
00:35:41.840also recognizing that there are tools that we can kind of hack into and use to advance the cause
00:35:49.500of justice as messy and kind of imperfect as that might always be. But I would also say we're
00:35:56.960starting to see the concept of legal personhood be applied to parts of the environment all over
00:36:01.160the world, rivers, mountains. The Colombian Supreme Court a few months ago declared that
00:36:06.960the Amazon rainforest is a legal person, a legal entity under Colombian law. What this means for
00:36:12.900the future remains to be seen, but it is absolutely being done for the purpose of protecting and
00:36:18.960preserving that ecosystem. And so I think that, and I think of it in a, you know, if Amazon,
00:36:25.480in the company is a legal person, why shouldn't the Amazon rainforest, you know, likewise merit
00:36:31.060that? If we even think about from a selfish point of view, how much we get from an ecosystem like
00:36:36.520that. And I think that's also part of, of what's happening too, as we understand more how, you know,
00:36:41.920just how vital these, these, these things are to us. What we used to call a swamp is now a valuable
00:36:47.820wetland, right? Because we learned that it does, it provides a whole lot of benefits to us and
00:36:53.060helps us, you know, stay alive and prevents flooding and gives us water. And so while I
00:37:00.200always, you know, try to, particularly in our cases, right, like always through the lens of
00:37:05.860the interest of the animal, the non-human animal, we can't, I think, ignore the fact that there's
00:37:12.660also an argument to be made that this advances our human interests as well. It's going to
00:37:18.260certainly crimp the wallets of some people who now make a lot of money off of doing bad things to
00:37:22.180animals, but in the longterm for all of humanity, I do believe that it's, it's a very important and,
00:37:29.440and, and positive thing. So we can talk more about, and that's the other thing I should say
00:37:34.480is that we are not here to say personhood is great. Like we inherited this system, right?
00:37:38.940It's there. So we have to work with it as lawyers. We can't, you know, say, you know, and I do get
00:37:44.740that, but I also, um, so we kind of try to do both things and we're the most conservative radicals
00:37:50.280are the most radical conservatives in the world, I think. Well, no, I think that using this legal
00:37:56.900framework as a tool is absolutely necessary at this time. I have been following up with what's
00:38:02.980been happening in New Zealand with the rights of the river. I think it was Tio Roera and then the
00:38:12.100Waganui River, right? And then, you know, Sariaku people in Ecuador are proposing a new international
00:38:19.280category for the permanent protection of native land through giving living entities personhood
00:38:25.100so i i'm very pro using the legal system as a tool in this framework and i also just you know
00:38:33.480it's frustrating to to look in and see that our legal system doesn't actually protect life itself
00:38:42.040because if it did we'd live in a very different world i mean i think about mining and just the
00:38:48.340disasters that have come from mining and the challenges of getting these persons, these
00:38:53.360corporations to actually clean up the mines that are killing the last intact salmon runs.
00:38:59.040I think it's actually insane what we're doing. And the fact that the court doesn't uphold
00:39:05.860morality, I think there is a major issue there. And I know we could argue morality and what is
00:39:10.960moral and what isn't and what framework and what religion are we following morality from. But I
00:39:15.740think that there's a morality in terms of protecting life, whether or not you follow
00:39:20.800some type of religious framework. And to take morality out of the system, although it could
00:39:27.020be challenging to have some type of moral constitution, it just, I think it just keeps us
00:39:33.960in this human exceptionalist mindset and this mindset that we as humans can do whatever we want
00:39:41.500to anything people more than humans natural landscapes that we can take we can change we
00:39:49.220can pollute we can kill we can take captive whatever we want and we can actually even have0.60
00:39:56.300a legal framework and a economic framework to do just that and actually make money off killing
00:40:03.140make money off murdering this earth which is in so many ways what we're doing i mean i've spent
00:40:10.360the last three months up in British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska, and seeing the devastation
00:40:18.820here in the last intact ecosystems in the world. I mean, there's, there's so few places left that
00:40:24.760actually have natural systems working. And to see just the edge of what this global economy
00:40:32.460is pushing like this edge of of life itself is is so I'm really I'm really fired up right now and
00:40:40.760hearing your responses and I do want to ask you you know you've touched on sentience a lot and0.59
00:40:48.000I know animal rights arguments are based upon sentience and the non-human rights project
00:40:53.300has chosen to focus on species for whom there is scientific evidence of self-awareness so I'm
00:40:59.900wondering if you view these qualities as necessary for recognition of personhood and
00:41:04.840if you could elaborate on why you've chosen this tactic and how it's forging a meaningful path
00:41:10.460forward. That's a great question. Yeah. And so we actually don't premise our cases on sentience
00:41:17.720exactly. They are on autonomy. Now, it gets a little bit squishy there. I mean, there's a lot
00:41:23.780of kind of gray area. And then we're also dealing with the fact that we're, you know, one's norm.
00:41:28.640You've got a normative system on one hand and a descriptive or hopefully descriptive on the other.
00:41:34.380They don't always play together so well.
00:41:38.000And I think we see that with climate change litigation now.
00:41:40.340It's just kind of denial of science that happens in so many ways.
00:41:45.460So we, again, look at autonomy because there is just a rich tradition of courts upholding it and really giving force to it and going to great lengths to protect it.
00:41:57.060And that is bundled up with sentience in a lot of ways, for sure. And you might even think about it in terms of the level of complexity of it. And to go to your second question, because we are always extremely careful to make this as clear as possible, we are not in any way arguing that what is necessary for personhood.
00:42:21.760And we argue, well, I don't even think that there is or should be such a checklist or
00:42:26.300anything like that, because if we're talking about the ability to have a, say, legal personality
00:42:31.900and have rights, and indeed to be protected, right, that should never be closed.
00:42:36.400We should never erect walls to the expansion of that, if nothing more than to allow future
00:42:42.220generations who are hopefully better equipped and in a better place to continue that expansion.
00:42:48.600So we never, ever say that anything is a necessary quality for personhood.
00:42:54.820But what we do is, again, we go back to the autonomy.
00:43:00.300And that's really what all of our scientific evidence, you know, with all of our cases, we file hundreds of pages of expert affidavits that lay out in great detail.
00:43:09.460And I should also mention that everything we've ever filed or ever will file goes up right on our website.
00:43:14.220So anyone can read it and use it and share it.
00:43:16.580So we introduce all the scientific evidence that really is meant to establish that these are, quote, autonomous beings.
00:43:26.180But, you know, there's no standard definition of that in the world.
00:43:29.360And we know that. But what we do is we just try to, in a very real way, overwhelm the court with how much is now known about them that we never knew before.
00:43:40.740it's a natural question, I think, of, well, if you're starting with these species, great apes
00:43:45.920and whales and dolphins, I mean, that's great, but there's not that many. They aren't the ones
00:43:50.580who are really suffering in the greatest numbers under humans, say chickens or pigs or cows or so
00:43:57.360many others. But I think we have to recognize a few things that we're trying to do something
00:44:05.300very monumental here. It's never been done, certainly not in the U.S. We're starting to
00:44:09.860see glimmers of non-human animal personhood in other countries, which has been great, but it's
00:44:15.740not yet happened in the U.S. And so we think that we need to maximize, make the best case that we
00:44:23.540can. We focus on these just very obvious autonomous beings. And certainly what we believe and write
00:44:33.640and say is that, and again, going back to the common law, it expands as our understanding of
00:44:39.020science expands. And so I think over time, we will see more and more species as autonomous.
00:44:47.000But I also think that we can't ignore the reality that I think it's likely or possible that you
00:44:53.300could establish autonomy and say a pig in some meaningful way. But the idea that one could just
00:44:59.600go and make the arguments that we're making on behalf of a pig in the United States right now
00:45:03.440is just, I think, a non-starter because you would be asking a judge to, you know, do something quite
00:45:10.180different than what we're doing with our cases. So, for example, in Connecticut, there's three
00:45:17.040elephants traveling circus. And this, I think, is a good example because they're obviously not
00:45:26.780native to Connecticut. You know, they're all stolen from various parts of Asia. They're all
00:45:31.700Asian elephants, Beulah, Minnie, and Karen, for, you know, 30 or 40 years, forced to give rides
00:45:37.400and everything else. And so they're not natives. There's clearly, there's not that many of them in0.99
00:45:42.760the U.S. And they also don't have, and this is, you know, sounds awful to say, but they don't have
00:45:49.600a high economic value in the sense that there aren't, you know, multi-billion dollar industries
00:45:54.960that are built around raising and killing and selling their flesh the way that there are for,
00:46:00.540again, cows and pigs and chickens. And so we're not creating any kinds of necessary conditions
00:46:06.940or advocating necessary conditions for personhood. But at the same time, we're being
00:46:14.140somewhat narrow. And I think that it's a strategic and important thing. And also because when we go
00:46:20.200into court, again, as lawyers, we put on different hats. And if we're seen to be,
00:46:28.240frankly too ideological in the sense that we're trying to uh i don't almost lever too much change
00:46:35.240um or for or kind of force the judge to make more change than he is comfortable making
00:46:41.140then um you know that could would just be an almost an obstacle that we would have a lot of
00:46:49.820trouble ever getting around and when we look at the situation now you know because we have to
00:46:56.940you're dealing with a human being, right? The judge, we have this idea that we get,
00:47:01.140I think we grow up in this system and it is kind of, uh, frankly, um, a little absurd sometimes
00:47:07.060how powerful our judges can be, or you look at the Supreme court and a lifetime appointment.
00:47:11.960And I think we need to, I think we really need to rethink that and go back to, uh, to how we,
00:47:17.420how we do those appointments. But, you know, the, the, the issue that I think that, and I,
00:47:22.040I've raised this to bring out something that we've seen from a number of judges,
00:47:24.980they're uncomfortable they they don't want to they don't want to go too far ahead and i think
00:47:31.320they some of them have a fear and it's not a baseless fear right that if a chimpanzee an
00:47:37.220elephant becomes a legal person for the first time ever and we can suddenly have animals who can have
00:47:41.840legal rights what might that do to society right um i think the people who are afraid or opposed
00:47:47.500to us would say you know give you a doomsday scenario in their mind right that everyone's
00:47:52.920going to be compulsory veganism and, you know, X, Y, Z. And I just, you know, obviously, I think
00:47:58.760that's pretty reactionary and quite absurd. But I do think it's fair to say that we don't know what
00:48:05.900it looks like. We've never had that world. That shouldn't stop us from taking the first bold
00:48:11.200steps into that world. And indeed, you know, happily, we've had judges who have, you know,
00:48:16.320had the courage and I would say the, you know, the clarity of thought to say, you know, no,
00:48:22.640this case is about this chimpanzee or this elephant, and it may indeed have impacts for
00:48:27.720other animals, but that's the way it should be, right? If it's a good decision and if it can carry
00:48:32.620further, then that's the way the law, the common law in particular, is supposed to work. And so
00:48:38.880we've seen both sides of that argument. It's called the slippery slope, the idea that if you
00:48:45.220let this happen, a chimpanzee, an elephant, tomorrow it's going to be a cow, a pig, a chicken.
00:48:49.740And so, you know, we have to also keep in mind at all times that we're working on a lot of
00:48:55.760different fronts at once. You know, we have this very kind of artificial forum of the courts,
00:49:01.720right, where we have to make very specific types of arguments and think and argue in certain ways.
00:49:07.480But then we also have to think about, well, how do we present this like what I'm doing right now?
00:49:11.760How do we present this, the bigger picture to the world, you know, so that folks can understand it?
00:49:17.060And even more, you know, how do we, and the process that we're, you know, very much involved with now, how do we get these various segments of society, everything from, you know, business to government to religious groups, faith leaders?
00:49:32.760How do we get folks to begin to, you know, digest all this and incorporate it?
00:49:36.980And, you know, for me, that's where the real beauty of being able to file and argue lawsuits like this is because it's sort of like a cauldron, right?
00:49:46.300The legal system is a very intense in its real kind of good form.
00:49:51.440It's this rigorous analytical process.
00:49:53.980And what comes out on the other side is this sort of hardened, kind of baked, you know, sturdy, one would hope, item of law.
00:50:03.100And so we're now at a place which is really exciting for us with this decision that we got in May from the from the high court in New York, where we no longer have to be the ones, you know, kind of making the arguments.
00:50:15.000Indeed, if you go on our website and read this opinion, which I encourage everyone to do, it's only about six, seven pages.
00:50:23.100You have this powerful judge saying things like our cases speak to our relationship with all the world around us.
00:50:30.660And that the categorical denial of rights to all animals is a manifest injustice.
00:50:37.820And that a chimpanzee is certainly not a thing.
00:50:40.920You know, this opinion is full of this beautiful language.
00:50:43.280It's almost too it's almost too good that we wouldn't even write it because we would be afraid that the judges would think, oh, you know, this is too much.
00:50:50.740And so I think that is is is so important, because while it can seem, I think, unsatisfying, oh, you're doing one case at a time and they take years.
00:51:00.520Like, how are you ever going to really make a dent in anything?
00:51:04.220I think the reality is it's quite different because when you have something like this, and maybe the U.S. legal system is somewhat unique in this way, you know, cases like this can really serve as drivers for legislative action, for all sorts of positive changes.
00:51:20.740And indeed, we're already seeing that. We've had interest from legislators on all levels who have approached us or have responded to us to say that, yeah, we support what you're doing. And so we're now getting to that point where we're just starting to see the fruits of our labor kind of come out in a really substantial way.
00:52:20.740wow kevin this has been such an incredible conversation and i feel like
00:52:29.960i could speak with you for many many hours but i also know that it's late where you are well i'll
00:52:36.340come back okay well this this is good because i did i definitely have a lot more questions and
00:52:42.320and thoughts to mull over with you so um this has been just it's been a great conversation
00:52:47.880has really gotten my wheels turning has definitely added kindling to my fire i feel pretty yeah i
00:52:54.880feel very fired up so it's it's good because for me it's in the morning so it's like i don't even
00:52:59.020need a cup of coffee i just need to talk about uh legal issues and there i go so thank you so much
00:53:06.740and well that's see that's happy to do that anytime we can um anytime we can do that we're
00:53:11.300happy and so you know nonhumanrights.org we're on uh facebook but we our instagram is way more fun
00:53:18.300it's my personal opinion just because facebook is facebook and so we're on twitter we're everywhere
00:53:25.160we also have a documentary film about us i should mention uh interesting um it came out on hbo two
00:53:31.860years ago it's called unlocking the cage it's been on the bbc and french national television
00:53:36.440And it was done by two of the most decorated and prominent documentary filmmakers, certainly in the U.S., and it was just nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy for Best Social Justice Documentary.
00:53:50.480So we'll actually be at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards in New York in a couple of weeks.
00:53:56.620And, you know, that's just one more signal to us that the world is starting to see this as what we have always seen it as, a serious social justice issue and really following in the heels of previous ones.
00:54:09.740And so for anyone who wants to learn about our work and any of our filings and everything that we do, we have a really proud of our website and how much we put on there.
00:54:19.060And of course, you know, if anyone, we always, you know, are looking for financial support and perhaps more interestingly, you know, folks to volunteer and just remain in our network so that as we go forward, you know, we may very well be trying to pass a rights bill in your city or your state.
00:54:39.200So having folks in our network that we can, you know, reach out to and give, hopefully give, you know, tangible opportunities to really assist us in making all this happen.
00:54:50.820Well, thank you for letting us know that.
00:54:52.660And I definitely support what you're doing and I'm sure all the people who are listening in will too.