Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals.

• Author: Posner, Richard A.

Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. By Steven M. Wise.(*) Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books., 2000. Pp. 362. $25.00.

The "animal rights" movement is gathering steam, and Steven Wise is one of the pistons. A lawyer whose practice is the protection of animals, he has now written a book in which he urges courts in the exercise of their common-law powers of legal rulemaking to confer legally enforceable fights on animals, beginning with chimpanzees and bonobos (the two most intelligent primate species).(1) Although Wise is well-informed about his subject--the biological as well as legal aspects--this is not an intellectually exciting book. I do not say this in criticism. Remember who Wise is: a practicing lawyer who wants to persuade the legal profession that courts should do much more to protect animals. Judicial innovation proceeds incrementally; as Holmes put it, the courts, in their legislative capacity, "are confined from molar to molecular motions."(2) Wise's practitioner's perspective is, as we shall see, both the strength and the weakness of the book.

If Wise is to persuade his chosen audience, he must show how courts can proceed incrementally, building on existing cases and legal concepts, toward his goal of radically enhanced legal protection for animals. Recall the process by which, starting from the unpromising principle that "separate but equal" was constitutional, the Supreme Court outlawed official segregation. First, certain public facilities were held not to be equal; then segregation of law schools was invalidated as inherently unequal because of the importance of the contacts made in law school to a successful legal practice; then segregation of elementary schools was outlawed on the basis of social scientific evidence that this segregation, too, was inherently unequal; then the "separate but equal" principle itself, having been reduced to a husk, was quietly buried and the no-segregation principle of the education cases extended to all public facilities, including rest rooms and drinking fountains.

That is the process that Wise envisages for the animal-rights movement, although the end point is less clear. We have, Wise points out, a robust conception of human rights, and we apply it even to people who by reason of retardation or other mental disability cannot enforce their own rights but need a guardian to do it for them. The evolution of human-rights law has involved not only expanding the number of rights but also expanding the number of rights-holders, notably by adding women and blacks. (Much of Wise's book is about human rights, and about the methodology by which judges enlarge human rights in response to changed understandings.) We also have a long history of providing legal protections for animals that recognize their sentience, their emotional capacity, and their capacity to suffer pain; these protections have been growing too.

Wise wants to merge these legal streams by showing that the apes that are most like us genetically, namely the chimpanzees and the bonobos, are also very much like us in their mentation, which exceeds that of human infants and profoundly retarded people. He believes that they are enough like us to be in the direct path of rights expansion. So far as deserving to have rights is concerned, he finds no principled difference between the least mentally able people and the most mentally able animals, as the two groups overlap--or at least too little difference to justify interrupting, at the gateway to the animal kingdom, the expansive rights trend that he has discerned. The law's traditional dichotomy between humans and animals is a vestige of bad science and of a hierarchizing tendency that put men over animals just as it put free men over slaves. Wise does not say how many other animal species besides chimpanzees and bonobos he would like to see entitled, but he makes clear that he regards entitling those two species as a milestone, not as the end of the road.

That is the book in a nutshell, but there is, of course, much filling in of details, including interesting bits of history, such as that the Old Testament method of punishing a domestic animal that killed a human being reflected a belief that such an act was insurrectional in character, like a slave revolt. Nevertheless, Wise's treatment of the history of animal law is not entirely satisfactory. He fails to note the inconsistency between the law's treating animals like slaves and what he takes to be the law's ignorance of the commonality between people and animals. After all, no one ever doubted that slaves had formidable mental capacities, whether or not equal to those of free men. To punish an ox or a rat as if it were a rebelling slave is to accord the animal a considerable dignity.(3) And to impose capital punishment on people who have sex with animals on the theory that such couplings may give birth to dangerous monsters is, in modern terminology, to assert that people and animals are one and the same species. When we remember that the Egyptians worshipped cats and that in Greek mythology Zeus often assumes an animal's form to have intercourse with women, it becomes plain that the ancients had a more complex view of animal "humanity" than Wise gives them credit for.(4)

He fails to ask why, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, laws were enacted forbidding cruelty to animals. The laws were full of loopholes--essentially they just forbade sadistic, gratuitous, blatant cruelty--but they represented a dramatic change from the indifference of the common law to animals' welfare. One might have expected Wise to explore the social and intellectual developments that led to such a change--for example, the rise of an urban middle class disgusted by the casual cruelty of the lower class and disdainful of hunting as an aristocratic pursuit.(5) Both the lower class and the upper class in eighteenth-century England were primarily rural, and rural people are less sensitive to the shedding of blood than urbanites.

History is rather to one side of Wise's project and might be regarded indeed as little more than padding; it does no work in the book. What is important to his argument is that animals, or at least some species of them, have consciousness (he means consciousness of self--obviously animals are conscious in the sense that distinguishes being conscious from being unconscious), and he devotes a good deal of attention to that issue. Wise recites a scientist's speculation that when two gazelles are being chased by a lion, each "gazelle must realize that it was she who was being chased, as well as another gazelle who was not her, and ... she must understand, however dimly, that dire consequences will flow for her if she, and not the other gazelle, is caught."(6) Wise's own focus, however, is on primates. The longest chapter in the book, chapter ten, entitled "Chimpanzee and Bonobo Minds," summarizes the evidence bearing on chimpanzee cognition. While the chimpanzee's cortex is less than a quarter the size of a normal human being's, it still contains an enormous number of neurons, perhaps enough for consciousness, though no one knows for sure. Wise marshals considerable evidence to suggest that language is not indispensable to possessing some, however rudimentary, sense of self, of separateness from other things.(7) (It remains unclear, as he acknowledges, whether chimpanzees can be taught to use language.) Comparisons between chimpanzees and very small children suggest similar mentation. Like human beings, chimpanzees develop much greater cognitive abilities when they are raised in a stimulating social environment (either their native habitat or a deliberately "enculturating" laboratory environment) than when they live out their lives in a zoo, so we may tend to underestimate their intelligence.

Wise argues that a properly enculturated chimpanzee has the mental ability of a two- or even three-year-old child. One may doubt this, considering that children of those ages have substantial linguistic capabilities, but those capabilities may be separate from, though obviously immensely helpful to, the capacity to reason. Wise convincingly shows that chimpanzees have formidable mental abilities, including the ability to make mental representations, to make and use tools, to count and perform simple arithmetical operations, to deceive, and to empathize; that they are self-aware; and that they have culture, in the sense of know-how transmitted across generations.(8)

It seems more likely than not, assuming the accuracy of Wise's summary of the scientific evidence, that chimpanzees do have consciousness, or "minds," perhaps on the level of very small children or severely retarded adults. Having established this, Wise has only to remind us that small children and severely retarded...