Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. Steven M. Wise. Foreword by Jane Goodall. Profile Books. 12.99 pp 362 

Darwin in 1871, in The Descent of Man, spoke of "sympathy beyond the confines of man" as a virtue beyond all others. "This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings." It has taken some time, but we are catching up. Or at least Steven Wise is. His new book Rattling the Cage has caught fire on both sides of the Atlantic and for good reason. The book is a gem. I can count only a handful of books that changed the way I saw the world and this is one of them. 

It is a revolutionary work for the effect it may well have, like the great Cautio Criminalis in the middle ages, which began the trend that made the burning of witches no longer thinkable. It is also a pleasure to read, giving intellectual and emotional satisfaction in every sentence. 

It has taken a while to get used to the moral implications of the "inherent dignity of the human person," as the convention against torture calls it. Professor Wise (he teaches animal law at law schools at Harvard, Chicago and Vermont) asks us to take the imaginative leap and begin to think about the same concept for animals. Actually he is not asking us to make any imaginative leap, he is on the contrary taking us step by step along a simple logical trajectory taking us through the history of human attitudes towards slavery, the rights of women, of children, until we see that we are resisting the basic similarities between the great apes and humans in vain. If bonobos can understand some 3,000 words, we are at a loss to understand why they should not have some of the same basic legal protections that those of us who know fewer words in foreign languages have. Wise writes: "Just because a chimpanzee placed before a keyboard fails to produce something worthy of Shakespeare does not indicate that he has no mind. I can't produce something worthy of Shakespeare and neither can you. If fundamental rights depend on the ability to write like Shapespeare or paint like Leonardo, almost no human beings would have them."

I go along with this, though I accord greater importance to Darwin's notion of sentience, where what matter is not intelligence but feeling. The similarity of feelings between humans and other animals is to me much less of a jump, and far more fascinating, than our so-called cognitive similarities. On both counts it is good to remind ourselves that just five or six million years ago , humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos were the same animal. And as everyone knows by now, we share more than 98% of our genes with chimpanzees (in fact chimps and gorillas are more genetically dissimilar than humans and chimps). Actually, genetically, we are not completely dissimilar from wolves, and socially we are very close to wolves which is why we bond so easily and so deeply with dogs. If the human brain has somewhere between 10 billion and 100 trillion neurons, the complexity of the brain of just about any other so-called higher animal with three times less, is not so different. [Omit? That is why we instinctively cringe (and rightly so) from electroconvulsive therapy, the brain is far too delicate an instrument to be so invaded by alien forces.] It has taken us forever to acknowledge that other animals have conscious experiences, are aware, but the revolution is picking up speed and this book is giving it a mighty shove. We are forever looking for reasons not to accord dignity (rights, value, guarantees of freedom from pain, whatever it is) to other animals. "They can't point" we say. It is true, I do find myself wondering whether one cow is able to draw attention to something interesting for a friend. But Wise examines a great deal of research showing how many of the great apes do precisely this.

One of the great virtues of this marvelous book is to take you over ground that is both unfamiliar (the legal territory) and familiar, such as the ape-language experiments, but reviewing all with a fresh eye, a keen intelligence. It is like having a super-smart guide on an intellectual journey, who speaks ordinary language just like you and me but draws your attention to things you would never see with out him. Professor Herbert Terrace, a psychologist, achieved fame by claiming that he could not teach an ape, Nim Chimpsky, to create a sentence. Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker agree, claiming that language in humans is innate, and unique to our species. But until I read Wise's demolition of this argument, I had no idea that 240 teachers taught Nim Chimpsky, that he was punished constantly, and that Professor Terrace advocated using a cattle prod on him. Small wonder then that he was a linguistic failure. Which of us would not be under these circumstances? He was taught in a windowless empty, sterile 8 by 8-foot white concrete cinder-block cubicle. After Nim was gone Terrace returned to the classrooms and "wondered how I and the other teachers could have spent so much time in these oppressive rooms." All it take is for Wise to put in a telling ! After "I" to make us see that Terrace was completely unaware of another sentient being in the room. You have to love him for that.

The thesis is simple but inescapable (the great apes deserve legal protection), the logic is impeccable (their minds are enough like ours that it makes no sense to deny them personhood), the language is entertaining and the scholarship is daunting. He has assimilated everything in law and primate behavior to bring us the first book about the legal rights for animals that will not just startle you but convert you. I expect this book to become a much-cite classic, deservedly so.