“The same arguments we’re making now on behalf of chimpanzees are the same arguments that will be made when, and if, robots ever can attain consciousness,” said Steve Wise, president of the Nonhuman Rights Project.

For years, NRP staff has mounted legal challenges on behalf of nonhuman animals, hoping to use legal, moral, and scientific arguments to change the status of high-order, nonhuman animals from “things” to “persons.”

Chimpanzees share 99 percent of human DNA. Image credit: Aaron Logan // CC BY 2.0

The chimpanzee shares about 99 percent of its DNA with humans — which means that, surprisingly, they have more genetic similarities with us than they do with gorillas. Like humans, chimpanzees have only a small number of offspring, with females usually giving birth once every five years of sexual maturity, and on average rearing only three children to full adulthood. In social groups they perform cooperative problem solving, teach and learn from one another, and use rudimentary tools; mentally they have at least some concept of self, an IQ comparable to a toddler, and can actually outperform humans on certain cognitive tasks.

Chimpanzees also display friendship, joy, love, fear, and sadness through body language clearly readable by human emotional standards. When exposed to stress and trauma, they have behavioral disturbances that, in some cases, meet DSM-IV criteria for depression and PTSD.

Chimpanzees outperform humans on some tests of memory.

So, then, here is a question that’s all but unavoidable in a discussion of animal personhood: Is it all right that we’ve collectively decided such a creature does not deserve any of the same legal rights — not even a small subset of the rights — that a human being has?

“For many centuries, the essential distinction between entities has been that of those who are things — who lack the capacity for any legal rights — and those who are persons, who have the capacity for one or more legal rights,” Wise said. “We’ve spent many years preparing a long-term, strategic litigation campaign … where we put forward arguments that elephants or chimpanzees or orcas ought to have legal rights, in fact ought to be legal persons, in terms of the sorts of values and principles which judges themselves hold.”

In a case last year, one of their most high profile to date, lawyers from the Nonhuman Rights Project brought an argument to the New York City Supreme Court, which hinged on whether the writ of habeas corpus applied to two chimpanzees being held for use in medical experiments. The presiding judge ordered that the president of Stony Brook University, where the chimps were held, appear in court to argue against the case that they were being “unlawfully detained” — which by extension would imply that the chimps were legal persons with a right to due process. Although the judge later amended her order to remove the words “writ of habeas corpus,” and clarified that she had not intended to suggest that chimps have legal person status, it was an important milestone nonetheless.

The reaction from the public around NRP initiatives, Wise noted, has been largely positive — with the biggest resistance often coming from judges who are sometimes affronted by the unusual nature of the ensuing litigation. Meanwhile, he said, in recent times it’s becoming more common for artificial intelligence researchers to contact him after hearing about his work.