“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
“Just as with a human who’s not mentally competent, you would appoint a legal guardian who would have the best interests of the ape as their brief… I think there’s a clear model for legal guardians in the case of humans who are not in possession of their normal mental capacities and it would work fairly similarly.“ – Peter Singer
“The USDA’s own Inspector General issued a very scathing report about the lack of enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act by the Department of Agriculture. And I think that this agency tends to see itself, its role really as assisting, helping out the entities that it regulates as opposed to really doing anything to protect animals.”
Katherine Meyer
“People say, well we’ve got animal welfare regs, they’re fine. No, they’re not fine. Not when you can do that to a chimpanzee. Legally do that to a chimpanzee.”
– Roger Fouts
Copyright © 2024 Gooseberry Productions. All Rights Reserved.
