The founding of the Nonhuman Rights Project

When NhRP President Steven M. Wise was an undergrad at the College of William and Mary in the early 1970s, he developed a deep commitment to social justice as a result of his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement. It was this commitment that led Steve to become a lawyer. After reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, he decided to become a lawyer for nonhuman animals.

As Steve told Charles Siebert in 2014, “I thought to myself, well, if I’m interested in social justice, I can’t imagine beings who are being more brutalized than nonhuman animals. People could do whatever they wanted with them and were doing whatever they wanted with them. Nonhuman animals had no rights at all. I couldn’t think of any other place where my participation could do more good. I suddenly realized this is why I became a lawyer.”

A deep commitment to social justice—the idea that no being, including a nonhuman being, should endure discrimination and oppression based on who they are—still drives our work today. 

As an animal protection lawyer, Steve experienced firsthand the limitations of animal welfare laws, which can reduce animal suffering but do little to protect their fundamental interests or bring an end to the situations causing their suffering. Under the current legal paradigm, all human beings are recognized as legal “persons” with rights (corporations are likewise recognized as “persons”); we are the only animals with legal rights. Meanwhile, nonhuman animals are considered “things” with no rights: legally equivalent to inanimate objects, as Steve explains in his 2015 TED Talk.

Steve realized a fundamentally different approach was needed to confront these core issues. Thus, the man who was barked at when he entered courthouses to represent canine clients sentenced to death in the 1980s began what would become a lifelong journey to secure rights for nonhuman animals. After years of research and preparation, Steve founded the Nonhuman Rights Project in 1995 with acclaimed primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall brought on as a board member. Since then, the NhRP has grown from one man on a mission to a robust team with dedicated supporters all over the US and around the world.

NhRP attorneys Liddy Stein and Steve Wise confer before a 2017 hearing in Tommy and Kiko’s chimpanzee rights cases.

Our groundbreaking lawsuits in the US demand recognition of the legal personhood and fundamental right to bodily liberty of autonomous nonhuman animals living in captivity. With the support of world-renowned experts on nonhuman animal cognition and behavior, we argue that courts must free our clients to appropriate sanctuaries not out of concern for their welfare, but respect for their rights—and in accordance with the values and principles judges themselves have deemed important, such as liberty and equality.

After we filed our first lawsuits in 2013 on behalf of four chimpanzees held in captivity in New York, we secured the first-ever habeas corpus hearings on behalf of nonhuman animals as documented in the 2016 film Unlocking the Cage, directed by D A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. Habeas corpus is a centuries-old means of testing the lawfulness of one’s imprisonment before a court. It was used extensively in the 18th and 19th centuries to fight human slavery, and abolitionists often petitioned for writs of habeas corpus on behalf of enslaved individuals. The most well known such case is Somerset v. Stewart (1772) in which the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales granted the writ to an enslaved human being, freeing him unequivocally from servitude and transforming him from a legal thing with no rights to a legal person with fundamental rights.

In 2018, New York Court of Appeals Justice Eugene M. Fahey issued a historic opinion in our chimpanzee rights cases in which he urged his fellow judges to treat the question of nonhuman animals’ rightlessness as “a deep dilemma of ethics and policy that demands our attention. To treat a chimpanzee as if he or she had no right to liberty protected by habeas corpus is to regard the chimpanzee as entirely lacking independent worth, as a mere resource for human use, a thing the value of which consists exclusively in its usefulness to others. Instead, we should consider whether a chimpanzee is an individual with inherent value who has the right to be treated with respect … The issue whether a nonhuman animal has a fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus is profound and far-reaching. It speaks to our relationship with all the life around us. Ultimately, we will not be able to ignore it. While it may be arguable that a chimpanzee is not a ‘person,’ there is no doubt that it is not merely a thing.”

In 2019, our elephant client Happy became the first elephant to have habeas corpus hearings. In May of 2022, the NhRP argued for Happy’s common law right to liberty before the New York Court of Appeals—one of the most influential state courts in the United States—marking the first time in history the highest court of any English-speaking jurisdiction heard a case demanding a legal right for a nonhuman being. The Atlantic has called Happy’s case “the most important animal-rights case of the 21st century.”

Meanwhile, litigation modeled on the NhRP’s habeas petitions has freed a chimpanzee named Cecilia from an Argentine zoo to a Brazilian sanctuary, and the Islamabad High Court relied in part on our cases to free an elephant named Kaavan from a Pakistan zoo to a sanctuary. Both Cecilia and Kaavan are now legal persons with rights. 

In late 2016, three years after we filed our first lawsuits, we expanded our mission and work beyond the courtroom to include grassroots advocacy and nonhuman animal rights legislation. Running alongside our litigation, our grassroots advocacy campaigns are a way for nonhuman rights supporters to use their voices to help secure freedom and sanctuary for nonhuman animals in the form of rallies, petitions, letters and calls to elected officials, social media days of action, and more. 

A 2019 rally to free Happy.

The first of its kind in the US, our legislation will take the form of municipal ordinances that recognize and protect the right to liberty of all members of a particular species within a particular jurisdiction—requiring their release to sanctuaries or, if no members of these species are imprisoned there, preventing future generations from being imprisoned and exploited. Having completed the research and planning phase of this work, we’re now building relationships and support at the local and state levels. In 2019, we announced during a celebration of the life’s work of NhRP founding board member Dr. Jane Goodall at Los Angeles City Hall that we’d launched our legislative outreach in California.

We’ve also begun to hear from and reach out to members of Congress about the possibility of pursuing federal legislation. We continue to work behind the scenes with elected officials across the US to learn more about their interest in nonhuman rights and, we hope, gain their support.

In addition to our work in the US, we’ve begun to help set up and collaborate with legal working groups in England, Spain, France, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Portugal, Argentina, Israel, Turkey, India, and Australia to develop nonhuman rights campaigns suited to the respective legal systems of these countries.

The NhRP’s work is designed to take the debate about nonhuman animals’ legal status to the next level and free as many autonomous animals from captivity as possible. We’re also committed to raising awareness of the importance of nonhuman rights, sharing our research and legal documents on our website, and building a strong community of nonhuman rights advocates. Through litigation, legislation, and education, we are changing the way people view nonhuman animals and paving the way for their fundamental rights. Join us.