One Thing to Improve the Lives of Animals (Steve Wise)
“If you want to help animals in a general way, you have to stop eating them. That’s the number one thing you can do, and it will also help global warming, by the way.”
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Where Would You Draw the Line? (Compilation)
Jarrod Bailey, Richard Epstein, David Priestman, Laurie Pycroft, Roger Fouts, Steve Wise, Katherine Meyer, Theo Capaldo, Gary Francione, Lee Hall, Peter Singer, Sarah Baeckler, and Pedro Pozas Terrados respond to where they would draw the line and what criteria they would use when granting rights to animals.
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Drawing the Line (Steve Wise)
“When people ask where I draw the line, I say I’m not even really sure where I draw the line…What I think in terms of is, where would judges today draw the line using the principles and values that they use day in and day out?“
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Using Sentience to Draw the Line
“Many people argue that sentience should be a criteria for rights…if I were the Chief Justice of the Universe I might agree. But the fact is that I can’t find an argument in Western law that supports such a thing.“ – Steve Wise
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Drawing the Line & Hierarchy
“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
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Basic Rights for Nonhuman Animals
”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
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Four Categories of Animals
“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
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Different Kinds of Judges
“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
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Liberty and Equality
“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
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Legal Correlates
“There are all kinds of rights and when people talk about rights, sometimes they do it in a really fuzzy way.” – Steve Wise
