Standing Up for Rover

By Lance Morrow/Needham

Marbury Madison--the ears-akimbo German shepherd-Rhodesian Ridgeback mix who came from the pound--looks, frankly, like a neurotic mess. He glances cringingly at a stranger and slinks away behind the 26-month-old twins. By contrast, the twins, Christopher and Siena, toddle toward a downstairs playroom with the focused, menacing energy of a tornado aimed at an Alabama trailer camp. It is left to the lovely Alice, a tortoiseshell cat, to perform ceremonies of greeting and accept a scratch behind the ears.

Steven Wise assesses the scene with a professional eye. He concedes that Marbury is a wimp. He praises Alice for her social graces. And he calculates that for the moment, Christopher and Siena, dervishing through the terrible twos, are less articulate, less mentally developed, than a reasonably accomplished chimpanzee or bonobo (pygmy chimp), each of whom would easily outdistance the twins in communication skills, memory and complex consciousness of the world around them. So: Should the chimps, who possess better minds, have some of the legal protections that the twins, by birth, enjoy?

Wise, 49, is an animal-rights lawyer--or "animal-rights wacko," in the view of Rush Limbaugh. Wise has spent 20 years standing up in court for deer, cats, bald eagles, dolphins, assorted primates and other beleaguered species. It is a profession that Wise, who has a gift for comedy, finds amusing. In his study hangs a favorite cartoon, of a dog raising his right paw to take the oath in court, and the caption: "Rover v. Wade."

But Wise is serious about the work and, the more you think about it, reasonable. His ideas, at any rate, may be evaluated by reading his new book on animal rights, Rattling the Cage (Perseus Books; $25). Jane Goodall, in a foreword, declares it to be "the animals' Magna Carta." It is by turns eloquent, funny and pedantically legalistic--dense with philosophical and legal history, and with the sometimes bizarre case law of humans and animals. Wise explores the legal basis for granting certain common-law protections and rights to certain nonhuman animals--only a few, really, notably the remarkably intelligent chimpanzees. Cows, pigs, minks and others may not qualify.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Wise left behind his twins, his "companion animals" and his wife and law partner Debi in their colonial house in Needham, Mass., and drove to begin work as a lecturer at Harvard Law School, teaching the rights of animals. What's necessary, Wise thinks, is to coax what he calls a paradigm shift in people's understanding of the human place, and animals' place, in nature. If--hypothetically--a certain nonhuman animal has a conscious mind, with faculties of self-awareness, language, emotional bonds and social skills, is not the animal entitled at least to legal protections against imprisonment, torture, vivisection and other horrors regularly visited on creatures that, legally speaking, have only the status of things?

The danger of ridicule runs high in Wise's business. The public hates lawyers, and the idea of court-clogging animal-rights litigation makes eyes roll. Wise's job is to divest mankind of some of its metaphysical self-importance--the absolute dominion over nature granted by Genesis, Aristotle and the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchy in which man may use all subordinate creation as he pleases, for everything from food to biomedical research.

Wise argues that the world is a Darwinian continuum in which humans should exercise a seemly self-effacement, considering that "our DNA and that of chimpanzees is more than 98.3% identical." The world is populated by thousands of species, ranging from humans to insects. "I don't argue that the great majority of animals should have legal rights," Wise says--only those animals entitled to rights by reason of mental powers and self-awareness. It is all right to boil lobsters, for example, since they have no brain cortex or its equivalent.

Wise's argument seems to denigrate the divinity of mankind and perhaps of all creation--an unnecessary public relations error and perhaps a massive missing of the central point: a holiness and beauty in the world that make stewardship the only civilized behavior. "But I am a lawyer," Wise responds, "not a poet or theologian." It seems more people are leaning toward his cause. On the other hand, there are still a lot of fur coats walking up and down Fifth Avenue. The world is a long way from the paradigm shift.