Name: 【TED】Steven Wise: Chimps have feelings and thoughts. They should also have rights (Chimps have feelings and thoughts. They should also have rights)
Uploaded: 2017-10-27T10:41:27.000Z
Duration: 14 min 18 s
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I'd like to have you look at this pencil.

Modal verbs - B1

And so are books you might have or the cars you own.

The great apes that you'll see behind me,

I can do whatever I want to my book or my car.

The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison

who wrote a book called "James & Other Apes."

And he tells in his book how every single one them,

who saw his mother and father die before his eyes.

So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall

that separates legal things from legal persons.

On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges.

They don't have the capacity for legal rights.

On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons.

Legal persons are very visible to judges.

They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights.

Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things.

has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person.

Humans and legal persons are not synonymous.

there have been many human beings over the centuries

Women, children, were sometimes legal things.

Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries

has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed

these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons.

Now, on the other side are legal persons,

but they've never only been limited to human beings.

There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive.

we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons.

a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person,

held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person,

there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand

and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person

when I had a full head of lush, brown hair,

because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the voiceless,

and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the trillions,

And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer.

And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something

all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend,

that the only thing that was going to work was they had, at least some of them,

had to also be moved through a hole that we could open up again in that wall

and begin feeding the appropriate nonhuman animals through that hole

onto the other side of being legal persons.

Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about

about the idea of having legal personhood or legal rights for a nonhuman animal,

and I knew it was going to take a long time.

And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years

before we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation,

long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch another hole through that wall.

It turned out that I was pessimistic, that it only took 28.

So what we had to do in order to begin was not only

to write law review articles and teach classes, write books,

but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts

So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was,

And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use

to put their arguments in front of courts.

It turns out there's a very interesting case

that had occurred almost 250 years ago in London called Somerset vs. Stewart,

whereby a black slave had used the legal system

and had moved from a legal thing to a legal person.

I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book about it.

James Somerset was an eight-year-old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa.

and he was sold to a Scottish businessman named Charles Stewart in Virginia.

Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London,

and after he got there, James decided he was going to escape.

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【TED】Steven Wise: Chimps have feelings and thoughts. They should also have rights (Chimps have feelings and thoughts. They should also have rights)

cognitive

relevant

conscious

engage