On the morning of December 2, a lawyer named Steve Wise and three other members of the Nonhuman Rights Project walked up the steps of the Fulton County Courthouse in Johnstown, New York and into the annals of history.

In Wise’s hands was a lawsuit demanding something unprecedented in American law: formal recognition that a 26-year-old chimpanzee named Tommy, kept alone in a cage in a local warehouse, is a person, possessing a legal right to bodily liberty previously reserved for humans.

One day later, Wise delivered a similar lawsuit in Niagara Falls, on behalf of Kiko, a chimpanzee living in the home of a couple who purchased him 20 years ago from an Ohio ice cream parlor. Two days after that, Wise filed suit on Long Island, claiming freedom for Hercules and Leo, two chimps used in locomotion studies at Stony Brook University and owned by the New Iberia Research Center, a facility infamous for the abuse of its animals.

What Wise and the members of his Nonhuman Rights Project assert is both simple and radical: that personhood — the legal prerequisite for having rights of any sort at all — should no more be based on species classification than it is on skin color. Instead, the lawsuits argue that personhood derives from cognitive and emotional qualities that chimpanzees, like humans, possess in abundance.

Tommy and Kiko and Hercules and Leo are not humans, acknowledges Wise, deserving full human rights. They shouldn’t have a right to vote, or to enter a restaurant or a public school. But they and every other captive chimpanzee are enough like us to have a right not to be owned and imprisoned against their will. If it’s not realistic to release them into a wild they’ve never known, they might be sent to chimpanzee sanctuaries, free to live with a modicum of the liberty they deserve. Not because we’ve deigned to be nice to them, but because it’s their right.

Whether a judge will agree remains to be seen, and most legal scholars, even those who support the case, think it’s unlikely. Never in the history of western law have ideals of liberty and equality been formally applied to an animal other than Homo sapiens. Judges don’t like being radical. The lawsuit also raises what many consider an unacceptably impractical possibility: personhood demands filed on behalf of not only chimpanzees, but animals used in research and on farms, or living in our landscapes.

'If you have the cognitive capacity to live life as you choose, you should be able to do that. Your species is completely irrelevant.'

Such information has previously been applied to questions of welfare, to cage sizes and research justifications, but not to fundamental legal questions of personhood. Yet this is where the science points, and though many people dismiss these claims as quixotic and impractical, Wise and his compatriots are following scientific fact to an arguably logical legal conclusion.

It’s still entirely possible that the lawsuits will be dismissed without Wise opening his mouth in a New York courtroom. But it’s also possible that a judge will at least agree to hear their case. If and when that happens, a chimpanzee will finally have his day in court. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a human or a chimp,” said Wise. “If you have the cognitive capacity to live life as you choose, you should be able to do that. Your species is completely, completely irrelevant.”

Aristotle’s Animate Windshields

The lawsuit is the culmination of a legal strategy seeded three decades ago, when Wise was practicing animal protection — or, as he prefers to say, animal slave — law in Massachusetts. He litigated hundreds of cases, ranging from the unusual mistreatment of dogs and cats to more unusual lawsuits: attempts to stop deer hunts, the transfer of a dolphin from the New England Aquarium into sonar research with the U.S. Navy.

Sometimes, as when an especially egregious abuse violated local animal cruelty statutes, Wise would win. But often his lawsuits were dismissed by judges who argued that Wise couldn’t sue on behalf of animals he or his clients didn’t personally own. In legal terms, they lacked standing: the ability to show how humans would suffer from the mistreatment of an animal.

It might sound illogical that an animal’s suffering could be legally irrelevant unless it directly affects a human, but “these are the kinds of gymnastics that animal protection lawyers have to go through,” said Wise during a September talk at George Washington University. “Nonhuman animals are legal things, and they have always been legal things. That means they’re essentially invisible to our civil law.”

Cruelty laws aside, some animal protections do exist, such as those for endangered species. Yet even those reflect the value society places on populations and species units. They say nothing about the personhood of an individual animal. And though individuality might be acknowledged in, say, requirements that research chimpanzees be given toys to play with, they reflect token generosities rather than any acknowledgement of an animal’s essential personhood.

“The example I give is that I can take a baseball bat, and smash the window of your car, and I’ll be charged with something,” said Wise during the talk. “But the car or the windshield doesn’t have legal rights. It’s not a person. Essentially, a non-human animal is a kind of animate windshield. If I’m cruel to her, I can go to jail, but the non-human animal is a complete bystander to this. She doesn’t have any rights.”

Wise furthered the analogy with references to animals as legally equivalent to tables and chairs — language that, to anyone who knows a cat or dog, or really has any experience with animals whatsoever, will sound strange: animals are self-evidently not these things. Yet as Wise argues in Drawing the Line, a 2002 book in which he articulated the legal and scientific framework of the lawsuits, western law’s view of animals has been shaped by an intellectual tradition that might charitably be called ignorance, from Aristotle’s proclamation that, just as slaves were made to serve their masters, so animals were made to serve humans, on through René Descartes’ characterization of animals as clockwork automata.

Whether this intellectual history is directly responsible for modern law’s treatment of animals is a matter of debate for legal historians. The fact remains, though, that Tommy — whom Wise visited personally in October, under the guise of being curious about a herd of holiday-rental reindeer also kept at a trailer dealership run by Tommy’s owner, and found alone in a newspaper-lined cement cage in a dank, cavernous warehouse with nothing to occupy his attention but a small color television — might as well be a windshield.

“There is no question this court would release Tommy if he were a human being,” read the documents. “There can be equally no doubt that Tommy is imprisoned for a single reason: despite his capacities for autonomy, self-determination, self-awareness, and dozens of other allied and connected extraordinarily complex cognitive abilities, he is a chimpanzee.”

The Mind of a Chimpanzee

Making a factual case for those capacities are the affidavits filed by the nine scientists, whose expertise spans not only primatology but psychology, neuroscience, animal behavior, anthropology, cognition and learning theory. The scientists are not themselves members of the Nonhuman Rights Project, and the affidavits don’t talk about law, only science. Gathered together, they amount to more than 200 pages of text and reference, reviewing hundreds of studies — not just their own, but from hundreds of other researchers — on dozens of cognitive, neurological and behavioral traits [see sidebar for a complete list].

Lawsuits aside, the affidavits are a veritable textbook of contemporary and historical chimpanzee research, and if conveying their full detail requires more space than a journalistic article affords, a few themes stand out. At a purely neurological level, chimpanzees share many of the same features — enlarged frontal lobes, asymmetry between left- and right-brain functions, specialized cell types in specific brain regions — associated with high-level cognition in humans.

Mary Lee Jensvold, an experimental psychologist and former director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, who worked for 27 years with chimps taught sign language, describes the conceptual richness of their communicative abilities, which include symbolic thought, perspective-taking and references to past and future events, and the parallel manner in which these develop in both human and chimpanzee infants. These are evidence, say she and others, of deep cognitive similarities.

A Cognitive Recipe for Personhood "The affidavits submitted in support of this Petition, summarized below, demonstrate that chimpanzees possess those complex cognitive abilities sufficient for common law personhood and the right to bodily liberty, as a matter of liberty, equality or both. Their most significant cognitive ability is "autonomy," which the other cognitive abilities support. These included, but are not limited to, the possession of an autobiographical self, episodic memory, self-determination, self-consciousness, self-knowing, self-agency, referential and intentional communication, empathy, a working memory, language, metacognition, numerosity, and material, social and symbolic culture, their ability to plan, engage in mental time travel, intentional action, sequential learning, mediational learning, mental state modeling, visual perspective-taking, cross-modal perception, their ability to understand cause-and-effect, the experiences of others, to imagine, imitate, engage in deferred imitation, emulate, to innovate and to make and use tools."

Another series of well-known findings involve tool-making and cultural traditions, both of which were once thought to be uniquely human capacities. William McGrew, an evolutionary primatologist at the University of Cambridge, describes how chimpanzees learn from one another to make complex tools that resemble those used by Stone Age humans and even some surviving aboriginal groups. “The foraging kits of some chimpanzee populations, such as in western Tanzania, are indistinguishable in complexity from the tool kits of some of the simplest material cultures of humans, such as Tasmanian aborigines,” McGrew writes.

Different methods of tool manufacture and use are considered hallmarks of distinct chimpanzee cultures, of which more than 40 exist in Africa. Cultures are also distinguished by social traditions: McGrew recounts how the famed primatologist Jane Goodall, who sits on the Nonhuman Rights Project’s Board of Directors, documented males of group she studies performing slow, rhythmic dances at the beginning of rain seasons. It’s not unreasonable, Goodall says, to think these might be rain dances.

Whether that’s so is speculation, but the cognitive faculties underlying culture are not. In chimpanzees as in humans, writes McGrew, social learning requires emulation, imitation, and an ability to explain, all of which signify a sense of self. That’s hardly not unique in the animal kingdom — even a cockroach likely has self-awareness — but there’s reason to think that a chimpanzee’s self-awareness is comparable to our own. Not only can chimpanzees only can recognize themselves in mirrors, which is considered a sign of sophisticated self-awareness; they also recognize photographs of themselves as youngsters.

Perhaps crucially, they’re capable of “mental time travel,” said Matthias Osvath, a cognitive zoologist Sweden’s University of Lund. Known for his research on Santino, a chimpanzee who makes elaborate plans to throw stones at zoo visitors, Osvath describes mental time travel as the ability to imagine oneself in the past and future, as well as the present. This capacity underlies an essential aspect of human experience, Osvath said: we engage in some form of it whenever our own thoughts stray from the immediate moment, and when we make plans.

It’s this ability that produces the autobiographical, first-person sense we have of our own lives, and it could very well mean that Tommy is both aware of the misery of his situation and can contemplate a future of never-ending captivity. If so, that would not in itself be the grounds for the Nonhuman Rights Project’s personhood claim: rather, it would be a facet of what the various capacities of chimpanzees, from complex memory and self-awareness to imagination and mental time travel, signify: autonomy.

'One of the chimps signed, "Key. Out.'"'

This assertion, that the cognitive qualities enumerated amount to autonomy, is arguably a judgement that drifts away from established fact and towards a philosophical argument about the nature of autonomy. But as psychologist James King of the University of Arizona, former editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, notes in his affidavit, autonomy isn’t even something we can directly observe even in humans.

Rather, we judge it by behavior, and “evidence for autonomous behavior in humans is not seriously disputed,” writes King. “In chimpanzees, the behavioral evidence for autonomy is not seriously disputed.” And if we can’t measure autonomy the way we can, say, gravity, it’s the simplest explanation for what we can observe in chimpanzees.

A few decades ago, before most of this research was conducted, when editors at the journal Nature castigated Jane Goodall for referring to chimpanzees with gender-specific pronouns, such claims would have been deeply controversial. After all, noted Osvath, science too had to free itself from the intellectual legacy of Aristotle and animals-as-machines. But the essential outlines are widely accepted.

To be sure, said Brian Hare, a Duke University evolutionary anthropologist who has studied cognition in chimpanzees and dogs, individual pieces of the cited research might still be debated, but over fine points of similarity and difference. “If you’re talking about it in a quick way, all those statements are accurate, but in each of those categories where chimpanzees might be similar to us, there’s different types of equivalence,” Hare said.

In other words, a chimpanzee has an autobiographical sense of self, but does he spend as much time as we do contemplating its future? Does he experience autonomy the way we do? That we don’t know for sure, but the Nonhuman Rights Project argument isn’t for one-to-one equivalence, but rather substantive similarity. Indeed, that’s essentially the judgment passed by an Institute of Medicine committee convened in 2011 to advise the National Institutes of Health on its use of chimpanzees in research: they’re just too much like humans to use in harmful experiments unless there’s an overwhelming, human life-saving reason to do so.

To all this, one might raise the question: Could a chimpanzee ask to be free? In the wild, where chimpanzees are known to communicate using abstract, symbolic gestures, that might indeed be possible, but Mary Lee Jensvold recalled a more germane story, involving chimpanzees trained to us sign language by Roger Fouts, the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute’s founder, early in his career, when Fouts was still at the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Primate Studies.

The chimps were sold to the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates in New York. Years later, one of Fouts’ collaborators, Gonzaga University comparative psychologist Mark Bodamer, visited the laboratory. “He met the signing chimps,” said Jensvold. “The chimps were signing. One of the technicians said, ‘They’re always doing that.’ And one of the chimps signed, ‘Key. Out.'”

Does a Person Need to Be Human?

If the Nonhuman Rights Project’s story were a movie, it would cut now to a montage of hotel conference rooms, take-out cartons and ever-growing piles of paper strewn around the project’s principals. There’s Wise, of course, his hair grayer and face more lined than in the dust-jacket photos of his books; Elizabeth Stein, Wise’s intellectual sparring partner, who left financial law to defend animals; Monica Miller, a recent law school graduate who handles their legal database-dives and archive-searches; executive director Natalie Prosin, who does a little of everything; and, appearing via Skype on a laptop, Lori Marino, the Emory University neuroscientist who first showed that dolphins could recognize themselves in mirrors.

Over the past two years, with volunteer help from dozens of animal law students and lawyers, the group analyzed the laws of all 50 states, plumbing the arcana of 19th-century slave cases and legal guardianship precedents, posing for each some 60 fine-print questions designed to identify the most legally hospitable state for their lawsuit. Earlier this year they picked New York, where courts have historically been generous in their willingness to hear personhood claims, and decided to bring suit on behalf of every chimp they could find.

Two of these, named Merlin and Reba, kept in a cage at a zoo in the upstate town of Catskills, died before the case was ready. Merlin was the second to die, three months after Reba, from complications resulting from an abscessed tooth. According to the Nonhuman Rights Project, he spent the last several weeks of his life punching himself in the face. A third chimpanzee, a 28-year-old named Charlie, “The Karate Chimp, who was owned by the same couple who own Kiko, died in early November. The couple, Carmen and Christi Presti, run a self-described primate sanctuary previously known as Monkey Business; they’d purchased Charlie as a 15-month-old, later teaching him karate and displaying him on TV shows including America’s Funniest Home Videos and How I Met Your Mother.

The Christis did not respond to requests to be interviewed, nor did Tommy’s owner, Patrick Lavery, or Stony Brook University, where Hercules and Leo are used in anatomist Susan Larson’s research on primate locomotion. Both are owned by the New Iberia Research Center, to which a third Stony Brook chimpanzee, named Carter, was returned last August. A chimpanzee named Carter is also mentioned in a 2007 Humane Society undercover investigation at NIRC, which has been accused of illegally breeding chimps.

The HSUS allegations described several hundred NIRC chimpanzees living in barren, windowless concrete rooms, with literally nothing to do, sometimes in isolation and at other times packed into cages. Infants were routinely taken from their mothers shortly after birth; in the wild, they’d have nursed for five years, and remained with their mothers for several years after that. At NIRC, juveniles often displayed the compulsive rocking typical of abandoned human children. “Danielle gave birth to son Carter on 9/1/06,” read the report. “Carter was taken from his mother so she could be bred again.”

New Iberia was ultimately fined a pittance of $18,000 for violating the Animal Welfare Act. This sort of treatment, and the institution of chimpanzee ownership that supports it, isn’t just wrong, contends Wise. It violates their rights. To make that argument, he’s appealing to common law, a body of jurisprudence distinct from Constitutional law — Wise doesn’t argue, and has openly criticized the notion, that the 13th Amendment should apply to non-humans — and from statutory law, which is passed by legislatures. Common law is where everything else gets settled, and at least historically, it’s where judges have the latitude to make and interpret law in keeping with changing social standards and scientific knowledge.

Personal injuries fall under the auspices common law. So do rights to privacy and inter-family disputes. It was also in a common-law court where a slave’s personhood was legally recognized for the first time. That case, Somerset v. Steuart, took place in England in 1772, and is the subject of a book by Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall, in which he details the legal arguments that convinced one of history’s most influential jurists, Lord Mansfield, himself a slave-owner, that a runaway slave named James Somerset was a person with a right to be free.

'He’s called the law into question on its fundamental values of dignity, equality and autonomy.'

These run from Somerset v. Steuart and The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln to tomes of Roman civil law and Lemmon v. People, an 1852 case in which the New York Supreme Court allowed a dock worker to file habeas corpus writs on behalf of eight slaves held on a boat in New York harbor. That precedent, hopes Wise, will convince a judge that the Nonhuman Rights Project can represent the chimpanzees. They also quote John Chipman Gray, an influential late-19th and early-20th century legal scholar, who said that “personhood as a legal concept arises not from the humanity of the subject but from the ascriptions of rights and duties to the subject.”

That is, in a formal nutshell, the essence of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s argument: a person — an entity capable of possessing legal rights — does not need to be human. To a certain extent this has already been demonstrated by the legal personhood afforded to corporations and ships, but those are still human institutions. Wise is calling for personhood based purely on principle.

“Legal person has never been a synonym for ‘human being,'” reads the lawsuit. “A free being such as Tommy, who possesses autonomy, self-determination, self-awareness, and the ability to choose how to live his life, must be recognized as a common law ‘person.'” The rights to which Tommy is entailed, they stress, don’t include nearly all the rights given to humans — he’s not entitled to a free education or emergency health care — but by virtue of his autonomy, his capacity for self-determination, has a right not to be imprisoned.

This sort of right is technically known as a “dignity right,” and Erin Daly, a Widener University School of Law professor who has written extensively about dignity rights, called their proposed grounding in autonomy “a reasonable and interesting argument,” though unprecedented. “I don’t know of anything that says, ‘Anything with autonomy has dignity rights,'” she said — not because the idea has been rejected, but because nobody’s yet made that case so explicitly.

“As a legal culture, we do care about autonomy. It’s an important value in America, and more so in America than in other countries,” Daly said. “I think that makes sense to test whether nonhumans should be accorded dignity rights in some way.”

Should a judge feel uncomfortable with the idea that self-determination is an intrinsic basis for liberty, the lawsuit offers a related but subtly different argument, grounded instead in equality: the principle by which, if one person is similar to another, they are treated equally by the law. It’s on this principle that rights for blacks, other racial minorities, women and non-heterosexuals have been granted — and not because they were necessarily considered the full equals of existing rights-holders, but because they were equal enough.

Likewise, even humans whose cognitive capacities are well below those of chimpanzees — people with severe mental disabilities, infants whose brains won’t ever develop, adults with severe dementia — are granted some rights. They might be kept in institutions, or have certain decisions made for them, but they can’t be owned or experimented upon. That isn’t simply because they satisfy some arbitrary genetic standard, argues Wise, or qualify via legal loophole for the protections of fully abled humans. It’s because they have capacities of autonomy and selfhood, however limited, that we as a society value so deeply.

“We’ll go in front of a judge and say, “Whatever is the reason why a human being should have a right to bodily liberty, whatever trait they have, whatever characteristic they have, our chimpanzee has it too,” Wise said. “You can name whatever you want. Our chimp has it too.”

“The strength of Wise’s case is that he’s called the law into question on its fundamental values of dignity, equality and autonomy,” said Paul Waldau, who teaches animal law and ethics at Harvard Law School. “He’s saying, ‘If you will just accept these as the really beautiful foundations of our law, then I win.’ He’s using the real foundational arguments of the legal system to do this. And in a way it’s quite conservative: He’s saying, ‘The basic values are good — and watch how, if you extrapolate them carefully, they will take us: to legal rights for chimpanzees. That’s beautiful. It affirms the system, even as it asks the system to go beyond what it presently has done.”

Before the Court

Beautiful as the argument might be, however, can it succeed? Even among legal scholars who respect Wise’s arguments, and acknowledge changing human relationships to animals — widespread condemnations of cruelty, insistence on humanely-treated farm animals, the NIH’s historic rejection of most chimp experimentation, a fifteen-fold increase in academic animal law programs over the last two decades — it’s difficult to find one who thinks a judge will rule in the chimpanzees’ favor.

“I think Wise’s work as academic theory, as policy, as discussion, is second to none,” said Jonathan Lovvorn, a Georgetown University law professor and senior litigator at the Humane Society of the United States. “His work was transformative within the legal academic field. But I think that translating it at this stage into a legal strategy is just not feasible.”

The problem, said Lovvorn, is that chimpanzee personhood, however limited, is still too radical for most judges to consider. Though articulated in bedrock principles of liberty and equality, it’s still about an animal. It would represent a legal sea change; in the profession’s argot, it’s “too big an ask,” said Lovvorn. It’s true that common law has historically been flexible, a vehicle for judicial activism, he said, but that was far more true in the 18th and 19th century than it is now.

Other reservations that will almost certainly cross a judge’s mind were raised more than a decade ago when Wise debated Richard Epstein, a legal scholar at New York University, and Richard Posner, a judge on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “Chimpanzees and bonobos may be the obvious candidates,” said Epstein, but that could open the door to personhood claims on behalf of cattle or sheep or rats and mice used in human life-saving medical research. “It’s not clear how far exactly you want to run this,” he said.

To this, Wise would rejoin that the lawsuit is about the possibility of granting a single right to chimpanzees, and has nothing to do with sheep or rats — but it’s no secret that it represents what Wise has often described as his goal of breaking down the legal wall that now separates humans from all other animals. “Once we begin to punch through that wall,” said Wise, “all sorts of roads possibly open.”

Chimpanzees are now considered exceptional, but similar arguments could presently be made on behalf of other great apes, elephants and some cetaceans, which the Nonhuman Rights Project had also considered. Given that many scientists now recognize consciousness across the animal kingdom, autonomy may eventually prove to be an easily attainable standard for personhood.

One might argue that it’s only ethically and scientifically consistent to judge the personhood of each species empirically, as the Nonhuman Rights Project does with chimpanzees, and contemplate rights on a species-by-species basis. From a certain perspective, this is even exciting: if a non-human animals can be persons, then what sort of persons should they be? What rights should they have, or not? Might an entirely new class of rights possession, “animalhood,” be established? But excitement is not what most career- and reputation-minded judges seek.

'Once we begin to punch through that wall, all sorts of roads open.'

In the meantime, says Lovvorn, there’s a danger that the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts will distract from more practical, immediately realistic animal welfare reforms, such as improvements in farm animal treatment or reductions in biomedical experiments on animals. Opponents of such reforms, said Lovvorn, might seize upon chimpanzee personhood as an example of the radical changes that ostensibly modest reformers really want. “I can’t tell you how many times we hear people say, ‘We can’t give pigs or laying hens enough room to turn around and stretch their wings, because the end game here is personhood for animals and an end to their commercial use.'”

Brian Hare also struck a practical tone, noting that reforms already underway to protect chimpanzees, such as eliminating a federal loophole that grants endangered status to wild but not captive chimps, could accomplish some of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s goals while avoiding thorny questions of personhood. “I think it’s great that he’s asking the question and challenging the law,” said Hare, “but I’m not sure that this particular solution is necessary, or in the best interest of the chimpanzees themselves. I think they are fighting for rights when they should be fighting for welfare and conservation.”

William McGrew, however, expressed reservations about the limits of good intentions in the absence of enforceable rights. McGrew said he used to think that, “once humans knew of the apes’ qualities, people would extend their concern to their closest living relations.” Now, “being older and wiser, I see that was unrealistically idealistic. Just like minors and minorities amongst humans, chimpanzees need legal protection” — and that, McGrew said, should include recognized rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Relying on endangered species protections also raises the question of whether chimpanzees would remain protected if someday they’re not endangered. Would they deserve any less consideration then? Rights, argues Wise, are a matter of principle, not something to abandon when they seem inconvenient. Neither are they uncontroversial or unthreatening, at least not when they’re first granted. And even if courts rule against chimpanzee personhood — something that, Wise concedes, is quite possible — at the very least a judge might have the courage and integrity to hold the discussion openly, in light of scientific fact and legal principle.

That discussion could well begin in coming weeks, as judges consider the lawsuits now before them. They might dismiss the cases summarily, without a hearing; or, if one decides to issue the habeas corpus writ, then the chimpanzee’s owner will be ordered to appear in court and justify the animal’s detention. Wise hopes that, even if judges aren’t prepared to accept that a chimpanzee could have a right, they’ll be courageous and open-minded enough to listen to the arguments.

If the Nonhuman Rights Project loses, said Wise, they’ll appeal the decision; if they lose the appeal, they’ll review their arguments and try again, and again after that. Yet there’s at least a possibility, however slim, that a judge will rule in their favor, and make possible the lawsuit’s concluding request: That Tommy, who can’t be released to Africa, can be delivered from solitary confinement in a warehouse cage and taken to a sanctuary, “there to spend the rest of his life living like a chimpanzee, amongst chimpanzee friends, climbing, playing, socializing, feeling the sun, and seeing the sky.”