

Two chimpanzees will continue being held at a Long Island university research lab after a New York judge declined to grant them a writ of habeas corpus. New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe spun heads in April when she ordered litigation on whether Hercules and Leo had the right to challenge whether they were being unlawfully deprived of their liberty. The two were being held for locomotion research purposes at the state-run Stony Brook University in New York.

But in a ruling issued days ago, the judge said the writ of habeas corpus is reserved for humans and humans alone. Therefore, the male chimps won't be transferred to a Florida animal sanctuary called "Save the Chimps," as the Nonhuman Rights Project of Coral Springs, Florida demanded (PDF) on the chimps' behalf.

In a 33-page ruling, (PDF) Jaffe wrote that efforts to give animals the same rights as humans "may even succeed" some day but that courts "are slow to embrace change." For now, she concluded that animals, "including chimpanzees and other highly intelligent mammals, are considered property under the law. They are accorded no legal rights."

The judge continued:

And yet, the concept of legal personhood, that is, who or what may be deemed a person under the law, and for what purposes, has evolved significantly since the inception of the United States. Not very long ago, only caucasian male, property-owning citizens were entitled to the full panoply of legal rights under the United States Constitution. Tragically, until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, African American slaves were bought, sold, and otherwise treated as property, with few, if any rights. Married women were once considered the property of their husbands, and before marriage were often considered family property, denied the full array of rights accorded to their fathers, brothers, uncles, and male cousins. The past mistreatment of humans, whether slaves, women, indigenous people or others, as property, does not however, serve as a legal predicate or appropriate analogy for extending to nonhumans the status of legal personhood. Rather, the parameters of legal personhood have long been and will continue to be discussed and debated by legal theorists, commentators, and courts, and will not be focused on semantics or biology, or even philosophy, but on the proper allocation of rights under the law, asking, in effect, who counts under our law.

New York argued that it was not a good idea to blur the "legal boundaries that exist between humans and animals."

"Any such extension of the writ could set a precedent for the release of other animals held in captivity, whether housed at a zoo, in an educational institution, on a farm, or owned as a domesticated pet, and enmesh New York courts in continuing litigation,” the state said.

The animal rights group argued that the chimps should not remain at the university because they are "autonomous and self-determining beings" and possess "complex cognitive abilities."

These include, but are not limited to, the possession of autonomy and self-determination, as well as numerous advanced cognitive abilities related to autonomy and self-determination, including an autobiographical self, episodic memory, self-consciousness, self-knowing, self- agency, referential and intentional communication, language planning, mental time-travel, numerosity, sequential learning, meditational learning, mental state modeling, visual perspective-taking, understanding the experiences of others, intentional action, planning, imagination, empathy, metacognition, working memory, decision-making, imitation, deferred imitation, emulation, innovation, material, social, and symbolic culture, cross-modal perception, tool-use, tool-making, cause-and-effect.

The university said the ruling was a "thoughtful decision." The Nonhuman Rights Project said it would appeal the decision and said it "has become aware that Stony Brook University has indicated it will no longer exploit Hercules and Leo in experimentation."

Listing image by Willem van de Kerkhof