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I'd like to have you look at this pencil.
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It's a thing. It's a legal thing.
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And so are books you might have
or the cars that you own.
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They're all legal things.
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The great apes that you'll see behind me,
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they too are legal things.
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Now, I can do that to a legal thing.
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I can do whatever I want
to my book or my car.
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These great apes, you'll see.
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The photographs are taken by a man
named James Mollison
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who wrote a book called
"James & Other Apes."
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And he tells in his book
how every single one them,
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almost every one of them, is an orphan
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who saw his mother and father
die before his eyes.
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They're legal things.
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So for centuries, there's been
a great legal wall
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that separates legal things
from legal persons.
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On one hand, legal things
are invisible to judges.
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They don't count in law.
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They don't have any legal rights.
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They don't have
the capacity for legal rights.
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They are the slaves.
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On the other side of that legal wall
are the legal persons.
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Legal persons are very visible to judges.
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They count in law.
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They may have many rights.
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They have the capacity
for an infinite number of rights.
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And they're the masters.
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Right now, all non-human animals
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are legal things.
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All human beings are legal persons.
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But being human and being a legal person
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has never been, and is not today,
synonymous with a legal person.
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Humans and legal persons
are not synonymous.
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On the one side,
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there have been many human beings
over the centuries
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who have been legal things.
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Slaves were legal things.
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Women, children
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were sometimes legal things.
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Indeed, a great deal of civil rights
struggle over the last centuries
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has been to punch a hole
through that wall
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and begin to feed
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these human things through the wall
and have them become legal persons.
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Alas, that hole has closed up.
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Now, on the other side are legal persons,
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but they've never only been
limited to human beings.
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There are, for example, there are many
legal persons who are not even alive.
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In the United States, we're aware
of the fact that corporations
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are legal persons.
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In pre-independence India,
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a court held that a Hindu idol
was a legal person,
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that a mosque was a legal person.
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In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court
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held that the holy books
of the Sikh religion was a legal person,
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and in 2012, just recently,
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there was a treaty between
the indigenous peoples of New Zealand
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and the crown, in which it was agreed
that a river was a legal person
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who owned its own riverbed.
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Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980,
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when I had a full head
of lush, brown hair,
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and indeed I was moved by it,
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because I had become a lawyer because
I wanted to speak for the voiceless,
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defend the defenseless,
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and I'd never realized how voiceless
and defenseless the trillions,
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billions of non-human animals are.
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And I began to work
as an animal protection lawyer.
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And by 1985, I realized that I
was trying to accomplish something
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that was literally impossible,
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the reason being that all of my clients,
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all the animals whose interests
I was trying to defend,
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were legal things. They were invisible.
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It was not going to work, so I decided
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that the only thing that was going to work
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was they had, at least some of them,
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had to also be moved through a hole
that we could open up again in that wall
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and begin feeding the appropriate
non-human animals through that hole
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onto the other side
of being legal persons.
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Now, at that time, there was
very little known about or spoken about
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about truly animal rights,
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about the idea of having a legal person
or a legal rights for a non-human animal,
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and I knew it was going to take a long time.
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And so, in 1985, I figured that it
would take about 30 years
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before we'd be able to even begin
a strategic litigation,
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long-term campaign, in order to be able
to punch another hole through that wall.
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It turned out that I was pessimistic,
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that it only took 28.
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So what we had to do in order
to begin was not only
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to write law review articles
and teach classes, write books,
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but we had to then begin
to get down to the nuts and bolts
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of how you litigate that kind of case.
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So one of the first things we needed to do
was figure out what a cause of action was,
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a legal cause of action.
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And a legal cause of action
is a vehicle that lawyers use
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to put their arguments in front of courts.
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It turns out there's
a very interesting case
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that had been heard
almost 250 years ago in London
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called Somerset v Stewart,
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whereby a black slave
had used the legal system
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and had moved from a legal thing
to a legal person.
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I was so interested in it that I
eventually wrote an entire book about it.
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James Somerset was an eight-year old boy
when he was kidnapped from West Africa.
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He survived the Middle Passage,
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and he was sold to a Scottish businessman
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named Charles Stewart in Virginia.
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Now, 20 years later, Stewart
brought James Somerset to London,
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and after he got there, James decided
he was going to escape.
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And so one of the first things he did
was to get himself baptized,
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because he wanted to get
a set of godparents,
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because to an 18th-century slave,
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they knew that one of the major
responsibilities of godfathers
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was to help you escape.
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And so in the fall of 1771,
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James Somerset had a confrontation
with Charles Stewart.
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We don't know exactly what happened,
but then James dropped out of sight.
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An enraged Charles Stewart
then hired slave catchers
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to canvas the city of London,
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find him, bring him
not back to Charles Stewart,
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but to a ship, the Anna Marie,
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that was floating in London Harbor,
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and he was chained to the deck,
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and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica
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where James was to be sold
in the slave markets
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and be doomed to the three-to-five years
of life that a slave had
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harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica.
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Well now, James's godparents
swung into action.
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They approached the most powerful judge,
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Lord Mansfield, who was Chief Judge
of the Court of King's Bench,
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and they demanded that he issue
a common law write of habeus corpus
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on behalf of James Somerset.
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Now, the common law is the kind of law
that English-speaking judges can make
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when they're not cabinned in
by statues or constitutions,
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and a writ of habeus corpus
is called the Great Writ,
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capital G, capital W,
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and it's meant to protect any of us
who are detained against our will.
-
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A writ of habeus corpus is issued.
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The detainer is required
to bring the detainee in
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and give a legally sufficient reason
for depriving him of his bodily liberty.
-
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Well, Lord Mansfield has to make
a decision right off the bat,
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because if James Somerset
was a legal thing,
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he was not eligible
for a writ of habeus corpus,
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only if he could be a legal person.
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So Lord Mansfield decided
that he would assume,
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without deciding, that James Somerset
was indeed a legal person,
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and he issued the writ of habeus corpus,
and James's body was broad in
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by the captain of the ship.
-
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There were a series of hearings
over the next six months.
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On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield
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said that slavery was so odious,
and he used the word "odious,"
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that the common law would not support it,
and he ordered James free.
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At that moment, James Somerset
underwent a legal transubstantiation.
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The free man who walked
out of the courtroom
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looked exactly like the salve
who had walked in,
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but as far as the law was concerned,
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they had nothing whatsoever in common.
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The next thing we did is that
the Nonhuman Rights Project,
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which we founded, then began to look at
what kind of values and principles
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do we want to put before the judges?
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What values and principles
did they imbibe with their mother's milk,
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were they taught in law school,
do they use every day,
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do they believe with all their hearts?
And we chose liberty and equality.
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Now, liberty right is the kind of right
to which you're entitled
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because of how you're put together,
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and a fundamental liberty right
protects the fundamental interest.
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And the supreme interest in the common law
are the rights to autonomy
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and self-determination.
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So they are so powerful that
in a common law country,
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if you go to a hospital and you refuse
life-saving medical treatment,
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a judge will not order it forced upon you,
because they will respect
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your self-determination and your autonomy.
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Now, an equality right is the kind
of right to which you're entitled
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because you resemble someone else
in a relevant way,
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and there's the rub, relevant way.
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So if you are that, then because
they have the right, you're like them,
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you're entitled to the right.
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Now, courts and legislatures
draw lines all the time.
-
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Some are included, some are excluded.
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But you have to, at the bare minimum,
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that line has to be a reasonable means
to a legitimate end.
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The Nonhuman Rights Project argues
that drawing a line in order
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to enslave an autonomous
and self-determining being
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like you're seeing behind me,
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that that's a violation of equality.
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We then searched through 80 jurisdictions,
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it took us seven years,
to find a jurisdiction
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that we wanted to begin
filing our first suit.
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We chose the State of New York.
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Then we decided upon
who our plaintiffs are going to be.
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We decided upon chimpanzees,
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not just because Jane Goodall
was on our board of directors,
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but because they, Jane and others,
have studied chimpanzees
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intensively for decades.
-
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We know the extraordinary
cognitive capabilities that they have,
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and they also resemble the kind
that human beings have.
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And so we chose chimpanzees,
and we began to then canvas the world
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to find the experts
in chimpanzee cognition.
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We found them in Japan, Sweden, Germany,
Scotland, England, and the United States,
-
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and amongst them, they wrote
100 pages of affidavits
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in which they set out more than 40 ways
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in which their complex
cognitive capability,
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either individually or together,
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all added up to autonomy
and self-determination.
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Now, these included, for example,
that they were conscious.
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But they're also conscious
that they're conscious.
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They know they have a mind.
They know that others have a mind.
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They know they're individuals,
and that they can live.
-
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They understand that they lived yesterday
and they will live tomorrow.
-
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They engage in mental time travel.
They remember what happened yesterday.
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They can anticipate tomorrow,
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which is why it's so terrible
to imprison a chimpanzee,
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especially alone: it's the things
that we do to our worst criminals,
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and we do that to chimpanzees
without even thinking about it.
-
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They have some kind of moral capacity.
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When they play economic games
with human beings,
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they'll spontaneously make fair offers,
even when they're not required to do so.
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They are numerate.
They understand numbers.
-
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They can do some simple math.
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They can engage in language or,
to stay out of the language wars,
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they're involved in intentional
and referential communication
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in which they pay attention
to the attitudes of those
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with whom they are speaking.
-
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They have culture.
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They have a material culture,
a social culture.
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They have a symbolic culture.
-
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Scientists in the Taï Forests
in the Ivory Coast
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found chimpanzees who were using
these rocks to smash open
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incredibly hard hulls of nuts.
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It takes a long time
to learn how to do that,
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and they excavated the area
and they found
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that this material culture,
this way of doing it,
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these rocks, had passed down
for at least 4,300 years
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through 225 chimpanzee generations.
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So now we needed to find our chimpanzee.
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Our chimpanzee,
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first we found two of them
in the State of New York.
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Both of them would die before
we could even get our suits filed.
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Then we found Tommy.
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Tommy is a chimpanzee.
You see him behind me.
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Tommy was a chimpanzee.
We found him in that cage.
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We found him in a small room
that was filled with cages
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in a larger warehouse structure
on a used trailer lot
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in central New York.
-
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We found Kiko, who is partially deaf.
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Kiko was in the back of a cement
storefront in western Massachusetts.
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And we found Hercules and Leo.
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They're two young male chimpanzees
being used for biomedical,
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anatomical research at Stonybrook.
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we found them.
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And so on the last week of December, 2013,
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the Nonhuman Rights Project
filed three suits
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all across the State of New York
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using the same common law
writ of habeus corpus argument
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that had been used with James Somerset,
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and we demanded that the judges issue
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these common law writs of habeus corpus.
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We wanted the chimpanzees out,
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and we wanted them brought
to Save the Chimps,
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a tremendous chimpanzee
sanctuary in South Florida
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which involves an artificial lake
with 12 or 13 islands.
-
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There are two or three acres where
two dozen chimpanzees live on each of them.
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And these chimpanzees would then live
the life of a chimpanzee,
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with other chimpanzees in an environment
that was as close to Africa as possible.
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Now, all these cases are still going on.
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We have not yet run into
our Lord Mansfield.
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We shall. We shall.
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This is a long-term strategic
litigation campaign. We shall.
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And to quote Winston Churchill,
the way we view our cases is that
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they're not the end,
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they're not even the beginning of the end,
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but they are perhaps
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the end of the beginning.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)