Chimpanzees

We are from an organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project, and we fight for the legal rights of non-human animals. Drawing a line in order to enslave an autonomous and self-determining being is a violation of equality. We then searched through 80 jurisdictions. We chose the state of New York. Then we decided upon who our plaintiffs are going to be. We decided upon chimpanzees. We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they have, and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. And so we chose chimpanzees, and we began to then canvass the world to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. First, we found two of them in the state of New York. Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. Then we found Tommy. Tommy is a chimpanzee. We found him in that cage. We found him in a small room that was filled with cages in a larger warehouse structure on a used trailer lot in central New York. And so on the last week of December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits all across the state of New York using the same common law argument. The court didn't approve our appeal because they think chimpanzees are not humans even though they have cognitive skills. We proved to the court that chimpanzees also have cognitive capacities, and they were not hearing us. We wanted the chimpanzees out, and we wanted them brought to Save the Chimps, a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida that involves an artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands there are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees live on each of them. And these chimpanzees would then live the life of a chimpanzee, with other chimpanzees in an environment that was as close to Africa as possible.