“By drawing the line I am reinforcing a dominance hierarchy. I am a lawyer, I’m not a philosopher…I want to operate within the legal system. The legal system that we have now is thoroughgoingly speciesist. So I can either make a thoroughgoingly speciesist argument or I can lose. “ – Steve Wise
”Sometimes people think that when I talk about getting basic legal rights for nonhuman animals, I’m talking about giving nonhuman animals human rights. But I’m really not, I’m just talking about giving basic rights to them the way we’ve given basic rights to humans.” Steve Wise
“I think both avenues, both trying to change the legal status of primates from property to persons as well as using the existing laws… can be used, most importantly I think, to raise the consciousness of the public, which is really what’s going to force the issue over time.” – Katherine Meyer
“In Drawing the Line, I set up a little system, a numerical system that runs from 0 to 1 or 0 to 100, and in there I set out 4 categories of animals…Those I call category 1…their cognitive abilities are so complex that I say now, right now, they should have at least the basic rights to bodily integrity and bodily liberty.” – Steve Wise
“I think the Great Ape Project has prospects of succeeding much more quickly than projects that include all animals, partly because to tackle the idea of removing property status from all animals would effectively be to wipe out major industries that exist by exploiting those animals, particularly the food industry.” – Peter Singer
“When you’re trying to make a change in the law or you’re trying to convince a judge to extend the law, there are certain kinds of judges that you would want to go in front of and there’s certain ones you wouldn’t want to go in front of.” – Steve Wise
“There are two different kinds of rights. Liberty is what’s called a non-comparative right…On the other hand, equality is a comparative right.” – Steve Wise
“There are all kinds of rights and when people talk about rights, sometimes they do it in a really fuzzy way.” – Steve Wise
“Many of the animals that I’ve written about are animals that are not indigenous to the United States and of which there are relatively few of them: African grey parrots, African elephants, the four species of great apes, dolphins. If you gave the basic right to bodily integrity and bodily liberty, there would be certain ramifications: you couldn’t keep them in zoos or aquariums, you couldn’t use them in biomedical research, you’d have to act in a way that respected them .” – Steve Wise
“Our most famous judges are Principal judges. The ones who say, ‘This is right and the law needs to right’. The judges who say, ‘This is how it’s been done for 800 years this is how it’s going to be done now’ are not the famous judges of our world. It’s the ones who changed something because it had gone out of fashion, it had gone out of date, become archaic. And so you want to go in front of those judges.” – Steve Wise
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