PRESENTATION TO THE SENIOR LAWYERS
DIVISION OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION
by Dr. Jane Goodall and Steven M. Wise, Esq.
Dr. Goodall
Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everybody. It’s the first time I’ve addressed a group like this. I have addressed some very diverse groups. One of the last interesting ones was all the top brass of the LAPD.
I can’t help feeling in a room of people like you that somehow everything I say is going to be held in evidence against me. I would like to say that I will stand here and speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But the reason we’re still working with the chimpanzees at Gombe is that we don’t yet know all there is to know, so I can only tell you a partial truth about what I know about these amazing chimpanzee beings. I think my mission - mine and Steve’s mission today - is to try to give you at least some feeling for the nature of chimpanzees, how they really are, and how in so many ways they’ve changed the way we think about ourselves.
We used to consider so many years, so many hundreds of years ago, that we humans were a truly unique and separate species and that we stood apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, sort of on one pinnacle, and that we were separated from the others by an unbridgeable gulf. The chimpanzees actually help us to bridge that gulf, and that leads us to a new respect for them as well as for many of the other amazing nonhuman beings with whom we share this planet.
I’d like to plunge us all into darkness, because I brought some slides. I’ll try to explain to you something of what we’ve learned in thirty-five years, while concentrating on ways in which these extraordinary creatures really do seem so like us, or is it perhaps how we seem so like them.
It all began thirty-six years ago; thirty-six years we’ve been studying these extraordinary chimpanzees in the little Gombe National Park in Tanzania (By the way, some of you may be interested that it is only twenty miles up the lake from the Burundi border; so its a pretty difficult time for us right now, apprehensive as we are of the swarms of refugees that may come across the border.) This slide always gives me a strange feeling, because isn’t this like some half-human half-ape creature walking along, striding along the shore of a prehistoric lake? In fact it’s one of the Gombee chimpanzees that we came to know so well. His name is Faban and he’s walking in this wonderful upright posture because he fell victim to polio in the epidemic we had in the early years. He’s lost the use of one arm, and to keep the limb from trailing on the ground, he’s adopted this wonderful posture. He can keep up with the others for long periods of time. The point is that chimps are genetically so like us, differing by only just over 1% in the structure of DNA, that they are susceptible to all known human contagious diseases with the apparent exception of cholera.
I very early realized that each chimpanzee has his or her own personality, although at the time this wasn’t accepted by science at all. And I was heavily criticized for giving the chimpanzees names. But you can even see the difference between these two faces I think - David Greybeard and Goliath. Old Flo and her daughter Fifi and Fifi you’ll be hearing more of in a moment.
Chimps live in a very definitely male-dominated society. The males are slightly bigger than the females and much more overtly aggressive. This is a typical aggressive posture with bristling hair and bunched lips, a ferocious scowl. The male chimpanzees in the community usually number eight to ten. They do sometimes fight and fight quite fiercely, particularly over social dominance and who’s going to be number one in the hierarchy. Although they do fight, the most effective performance for the males chimps in rising in the hierarchy is what we call the charging display, when he hurdles across the ground with hairs bristled and dragging, swaying the vegetation. He may pick up or throw or drag large branches. He’s basically trying to make himself look bigger and more dangerous than he may actually be and in this way he may intimidate a rival without resource to physical aggression which, of course, may result in him being damaged as well. We found that the males who have the most imaginative, frequent, and spectacular displays are those who are likely to rise higher in the dominance hierarchy. And each one who’s emerged as number one over the years has done so in his own special and unique way.
This is Mike as I first knew him in 1963. He was very low-ranking, probably about twenty-eight years of age, and no longer in his prime. He had lost some canines. But he was tremendously motivated to rise in the hierarchy and he was unusually intelligent. Here he’s got the grin of fear. Other males at this time, his superiors, are charging about below and he’s scared stiff. But it was Mike who learned to use empty kerosene cans from my camp and incorporate these into his charging displays. Some of you may have seen the National Geographic film which showed this so beautifully. He learned to keep up with three cans ahead of him, hitting and kicking them. Sometimes he would charge directly towards his superiors who would then rush out of the way, climb a tree, or hide in the undergrowth. It was in a period of just four months that Mike rose, as far as we know without a single fight, and took over the number one position. Having attained that position, he ruled for the next six years. Would he have done so without our cans? Every male had the same chance as Mike to use those cans. Moreover, every male used at least one can, at least once. But only Mike was able to capitalize on that chance experience and turn it to his own advantage.
Within a community, the chimpanzees settle most of their disputes by means of threatening postures and gestures. If you have a hierarchy, it’s easy, because everyone knows his or her place. The males, as I’ve said, are dominant over the females who have their own hierarchy. You don’t need to understand much about chimps to understand what’s going on here. This dominant male is swaggering the bipedal swagger, his message: get away from my food or I may have to hurt you. And by the way, when chimps do hurt each other, which is sometimes, it’s usually when the males of one community attack those of another community. This can result in something almost like a primitive form of warfare.
After a fight within a community, or a threatening behavior, the victim, even though sometimes very fearful, will very often approach the aggressor and adopt some kind of position of submission. And in response to that, the aggressor will typically reach out with a reassurance gesture, a touch or a pat. They may hold hands, they may embrace one another, or they may kiss. And this serves to restore social harmony after any kind of aggression, so that mostly the relations between the community members are relaxed and friendly. If they’re friendly when they greet, chimpanzees show many behaviors, like friendly human greeting, such as this kiss, which a young female is bestowing on an adult male who’s arrived in her group. These two, a high ranking male and a high-ranking female, have been separated a long time, so you have a rather more passionate kiss here. These two have heard a frightening sound across the valley and in response each one flings an arm around the other. They derive reassurance and comfort from this friendly physical contact. You can’t overemphasize the importance of this kind of friendly contact.
I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the chimpanzee family. The father doesn’t really play a role in this. Very often when a female is sexy, attractive, she may be mated by all the males in her community. They may almost line up and mate with her one after the other. Very often we don’t know which male is the father of which child. Sometimes a male takes a female away and keeps her away throughout her period of estrous. Then when she has a baby eight months later we can be reasonably sure that he’s the father. But very often, we don’t know. He doesn’t play any role within the family as such. All the males, as a group, protect the infants and the females within their own community from incursion by neighboring males.
This is the very famous family. Famous thanks to the National Geographic Society. The old female Flo, who was the first mother I really knew back in 1961 with her little infant Flint, her daughter Fifi and her son Figan. Figan went on to become the most powerful Alpha male in Gombe’s history, reigning for ten years and rising to that position through close friendly relationship with his elder brother, he of the paralyzed arm. Figan here is about eleven; he’s beginning to leave his mother and travel with the adult males, learning from them what he needs to know to be an independent adult in this society. He’s still spending a lot of time with his mother. And now Fifi is about thirteen years old. You have your first baby in the wild when you’re between ten and thirteen.. Here Fifi has given birth to her first infant. Here’s Granny Flo peeping down over her daughter’s shoulder. That’s infant, Freud, and here is the infant, Flint, who’s about six years old. Two years later we see Flo, looking older than any other female we’ve seen before or since; she may well have been as much as fifty years old. They can live to be sixty in captivity. This was taken just two weeks before she died. Her son, Flint, eight and a half years old, should have been able to survive without her. But he was abnormally dependent on this old mother and it seemed that after her death he simply lost the will to live. He fell into a state of what I can openly describe as grief, and in this condition, with his immune response weakened, he fell sick and died within about a month of losing his mother.
Back to Fifi. The mother suckles her child for five or even six years; it’s five or six years between live births at Gombee in the wild. There are good mothers and bad mothers in chimp society, just as in human society. We found that many females show maternal behavior that closely mirrors that of their own mothers. Fifi, like Flo, was protective, and playful and quite social; she spent quite a lot of time with other females. Here is Freud, enjoying a game with two other youngsters. But there were times when Fifi, like all mothers, was traveling about on her own. Then Freud had to amuse himself. There's lots to do in the wild. Like acrobatics, as you see here. There are many objects that serve chimpanzees as toys - like this big rock - and a lot that you can do with them. There are also baboons at Gombe. Here Freud has a particular play relationship with this young male, Hector. Hector’s trying to enjoy a game with another baboon. But bad luck for him, he’s got this tail, which of course a chimp doesn’t have. So Freud gets his way and drags Hector off to a session of rough and tumble play.
It’s extraordinary when you thinks that adult male chimps sometimes hunt, kill, and eat infant baboons. But then we play with cows and pigs sometimes and eat then as well. Young chimps have a lot to learn and they can learn just like human infants by observing and imitating and then practicing what they’ve seen. Some of the social behavior, like this grooming, which is so important in chimpanzee social life, is part of the inborn behavior pattern that the young chimp actually comes into the world with. Chimps will make grooming movements even if they’ve never seen another chimp. But they have to learn a lot about the context in which this is appropriate. And they don’t do that unless they’re growing up in some kind of natural social environment.
Young chimps are characterized by this tremendous curiosity about the behavior of others. This is how they learn about the feeding traditions of their particular community. These traditions may differ from one area to another, even if the same foods are present. They learn the tool-using behaviors of their community; chimps use more objects as tools than any other creature except ourselves. At Gombe it’s the termite fishing that is seen most often. By the time they’re about four years old, the young ones have learned how to manipulate these tools to fish for termites. In other parts of Africa where other chimps are being studied closely, we find completely different tool-using techniques, like this hammer and anvil technique for opening hard-shelled nuts that occurs in a lot of West Africa.
When Freud is almost exactly five years old, little Frodo is born. here you see Fifi with her two sons. Frodo is just a few weeks old here. Freud was absolutely fascinated by his little brother. As soon as Fifi would allow it, Freud would carry Frodo and they moved form one place to another through the forests. The two became great playmates and would spend a lot of time playing together. We realized how important it is to have an elder sibling in the family. And the child, instead of being thrown so much on his own resources, now has an elder brother who serves as sort of a built-in playmate and also a built-in role model. Frodo used to spend long hours watching carefully what Freud did and then usually imitating or trying to imitate what his brother was doing.
This was taken a few years ago - Fifi with her family as it was then. It numbers now five. Here is Freud, the eldest, about twenty-one years of age, is moving off into the forest. Five years younger is Frodo, about fifteen. He’s carefully watching and waiting to follow. These two males spent a lot of time away from Fifi traveling with the big males. Five years younger than Frodo is Fanni, Fifi’s eldest daughter. She’s ten, an adolescent. Five years younger is daughter number two, Flossy, and four and a half years younger is little Faustino, the third son. Now Faustino is three years old. Here we have Fifi with her first grandson. This baby was born while I was I was in America. I kept getting faxes that Fanni had a baby and that it was a male and what should we call him. So he’s called Fax. Isn’t it interesting that when Fifi was little, there were no such thing as faxes? At any rate, there’s the family and part of this amazing community.
I just picked one family. If I’d picked another the stories would have been different because they have unique family histories, just as each community has its each unique history. When you know chimps as well as I do, or any of us who have studied them in a reasonably natural situation, it’s very heartbreaking to find out what’s actually happening and how quickly the chimpanzees are disappearing, how they’re hunted for food across much of Western and Central Africa. They're also hunted so that babies can be taken from their mothers and sold. Many are sold locally, in the streets, or in the markets, for anyone passing who takes pity on them, and wants to rescue them. Some of them end up with the dealers. It’s not surprising that many of them die, because nobody understands that they need not only milk, but the same kind of affection and care as a human infant. Their emotional needs are similar. It’s not surprising, because the structure of their brain and central nervous system is so much like ours, more like ours than that of any other living creature. And what happens to them? They’re sold as pets. Sometimes they’re well cared-for. Very often they’re exploited, used as substitute children. Or they will end up in a circus. People are beginning to realize that the training of circus chimps and other exotic animals very often involves great cruelty, like beating over the head with an iron bar and deforming the feet by pushing the feet day after day into shoes - their feet are different from ours. Or they are used in entertainment, such as entertaining people at birthday parties. These people in the slide don’t understand what this chimp has gone through- all his teeth have been pulled out and an electric shock collar lies underneath his clothes. No life for our closest living relative. It’s still legal in this country to buy and sell our closest living relatives, as once it was legal to buy and sell other humans from a different culture. Here's an example of the post card trade. I just don’t understand some of these postcards. That one might raise a smile, but what about this one? It’s just obscene; here are hundreds of chimpanzee lavatory postcards. All over the world. I think that this one came from Spain. And the circus chimps, the pet chimps, the entertainment chimps, all outlive their usefulness when they get too big and dangerous. They’re many times stronger than a human male. Then they often end up in the medical research labs where they're used because they are so much like us that they can be infected with otherwise uniquely human diseases, diseases that you can’t give to a baboon or a monkey, you can’t give to a dog or a cat, but you can give to a chimpanzee.
There are some scientists who believe or have believed that chimpanzees can be useful in searching for cures and vaccines for things like HIV. I went to the Pelican Bay State Prison a couple of weeks ago to visit some inmates where I was reminded so vividly of having been in one of these chimpanzee medical research labs. The prisoners, because they’re human, have more space. They’re there, we hope, because they’ve committed crimes, but these chimpanzees in five foot by five foot cages have committed no crime. They may be there because some people believe that they are benefiting us, but they certainly haven’t committed a crime. And the conditions. For me it’s rather like going into a nightmare world. I think that Steve and I both feel that these conditions are inappropriate, that we shouldn’t be treating our closest living relatives in this way, and that unless chimpanzees can be given at least some kind of fundamental rights within the legal system, that nothing much will ever really change. So Steve, it’s your turn.
Attorney Wise
Good afternoon.
This afternoon it is my privilege briefly to help you understand why those magnificent beings whose lives Dr. Goodall so vividly recreates should be eligible for such fundamental legal rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty. As Professor Christopher Stone once observed, any proposal to confer legal rights upon the rightless "is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of 'us' - those who are holding rights at the time."
Yet few judges, law professors, or practicing attorneys can listen to Dr. Goodall's telling of the stories of the families of Flo and Fifi and Frodo and Fax with unmixed feelings. On the one hand we react, as humans must react, with initial interest and perhaps finally awe, to her compelling drama of full lives unfolding against the background of a mother's nourishing love, of competitors' jealousies, of sibling rivalries, of disputants restoring social harmony, of the affections of friends who have played together for endless hot and sunny days, of the triumphs of the weak but clever over the strong but overconfident, of the overcoming of physical and environmental adversities, of the inevitable capitulations to overwhelming strength, and of the fear and brutality, and sadness that are the inevitable consorts of civil war.
Yet on the other hand, trained and then submerged as we are in the canons and processes of law, we understand that Flo and Fifi and Frodo and Fax are today considered mere legal things, precisely in the same way that the chairs in which we sit, the plates from which we eat, and even the food that we have eaten are considered mere things, possessed of no rights that humans are bound to respect, not even the most fundamental entitlements to bodily integrity or bodily liberty.
As has every other nonhuman animal, chimpanzees have, since they first became known to the west three hundred years ago, been considered mere things. Their legal thinghood has proven devastating to them, driving them to near extinction in the wild and reducing them to pitiful servitude in captivity. We have tolerated, encouraged, and sometimes purchased their captures and the destruction of their families across Central Africa. We willfully ignored the brutal facts of their captures and the certainty that few would survive their intercontinental transport. We have, however, known full well that those who did survive were destined to live perhaps more than half a century in loneliness, pain, and fear behind thick metal bars in chilly sunless boxes of concrete or stainless steel, subject to our uncontained human whims - in all conditions to which civilized nations would not subject the most despicable human criminal. Yet, as Dr. Goodall observed, they have committed no crime.
For the entire four thousand years in which law has existed, a legal wall, thick, high, and seemingly unassailable, has separated human from all other animals. It took much of this time for the idea of fundamental legal rights to develop even for human beings. Not until the last century was every human being finally cloaked with the legal personhood that signifies his or her eligibility for them. That has changed. On one side of this legal wall, now even the most trivial interests of our species have been jealously guarded. We have now assigned all of ourselves, but only ourselves, alone among the millions of species that comprise the animal kingdom, the exalted status of legal persons, entitled to all the rights, privileges, powers, and immunities of legal personhood. Most especially, we have assigned ourselves alone the fundamental legal rights to life, liberty, and bodily integrity, those rights that together form a protective perimeter around our bodies and our personalities without which we could scarcely flourish.
But on the other side of this wall lies the refuse of an entire kingdom, all the other animals, including chimpanzees. It is and has long been the common law rule that nonhuman animals are not eligible for legal rights simply because they are not human beings. This same broad legal rule applies as forcefully and as equally to gnats as it does to chimpanzees. But to any lawyer, judge or law professor who has been exposed, even briefly, to some of the fruits of Dr. Goodall's thirty-five years of observing chimpanzees, the apparent overbreadth of this legal rule as applied to chimpanzees should naturally stimulate an inquiry into its justice. That must lead, in turn, to a tracing of its history, for every legal rule has its unique history and an understanding of this history is instrumental to the what Justice Holmes called the "deliberate reconsideration" to which every legal rule becomes should eventually be subjected.
As Professor Alan Watson once concluded from his studies of comparative law, "to a truly astounding degree the law is rooted in the past." The most common sources from which we quarry are private law especially are the legal rules of earlier times. But when we borrow past law, we borrow the past. Legal rules that may have made good sense within the context of what was then known and once valued may make good sense no longer. Raised by age to the status of self-evident truths, they may now simply perpetrate ancient injustices that may have been less unjust because then we knew no better. Like Theseus in the palace of the Minotaur, we must follow the thread of the legal thinghood of nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees, through the shadows of legal history. It will lead us to the most ancient legal systems known.
Ancient jurists declared that law itself had been created solely for human beings, the way ancient philosophers claimed that nonhuman animals had been themselves created solely for human beings. The third century Roman jurist, Hermogenianus, said that "All law was established for men's sake." And why should law have not been established, in his mind and in the minds of his fellow jurists, solely for the sake of men? Everything else was. This axiom was not confined to Rome. Justifying the massacre of guiltless nonhuman animals by a Flood meant to punish an evil humanity, Rashi, the medieval Jewish scholar, explained that "since animals exist for the sake of man, their survival without man would be pointless." So it was that the ancient Greek, Roman, and Hebrew worlds fully embraced the idea that the universe had been divinely designed for a single end-the benefit of human beings. It was not just that humans were somehow different from every other animal. It was that this merely instrumental value of nonhuman animals was understood to be radically incommensurable with the inherent value of human beings.
But the world that spawned the legal thinghood of every nonhuman animal from the gnat to the chimpanzee, as it spawned the natural inferiority of women to men and of human slaves to human masters, is not our world. It is not the world. We now know that the universe in which they believed they were living was imaginary. This imaginary universe has since collapsed beneath a staggering weight of evidence provided by a process of which they knew nothing - science. As a result, my daughter, Roma, now entering the fourth grade, knows more truly how nature operates than did the authors of the Five Books of Moses or Aristotle. No one with even a rudimentary knowledge of modern biology and physics can accept the truth of the ancient cosmologies. Yet they continue to play a critical role in perpetuating the legal thinghood of nonhuman animals, for Hermogenianus' teaching, that all law was made for men, implicit throughout the Old Testament and other ancient law, was incorporated by Justinian into his immensely influential sixth century Institutes and Digest. From there it was absorbed into the writings of the Glossators of Continental Europe, where it echoed throughout the works of the great common lawyers and judges of England - Bracton, Britton, Fleta, Coke and Blackstone - and was received nearly whole by their American descendants - Kent, Holmes, and the supreme courts of every jurisdiction in the United States. Today, the heart of this curious and imaginary physical world of the Ancients lies beating within the breasts of common law judges, animating the law that regulates the modern relationships between human and nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees. What Holmes said in the context of the law of master and servant applies. "(T)he evidence of it is to be found," he said "in every book which has been written for the last five hundred years ... we still repeat the reasoning of the Roman lawyers, empty as it is, to the present day."
Upon encountering this legal wall in the Holmesean spirit of a "deliberate reconsideration" of ancient legal rules, one is initially awed by its thickness, its height, and its history of success, at all levels of law, in maintaining a legal apartheid between humans and every other species of animal. Unsurprisingly, as they draw from a common well, international law, constitutional law, statutory law, and the common law all treat nonhuman animals in nearly the same way. But an expert and thorough inspection of this wall will eventually yield up its more important, if less obvious, qualities.
As one might expect of a wall erected by the biblical Hebrews and ancient Romans, its mortar is badly cracking and its foundations have rotted. While it has some years left, it has reached a state of decay. Because its intellectual foundations are unprincipled and arbitrary, unfair and unjust, its greatest vulnerability, at least in the English-speaking countries, is to the unceasing tendency of the common law "to work itself pure," if I may borrow Lord Mansfield's phrase. Common law judges have the duty, once injustice is brought to their attention, to place existing legal rules alongside those great overarching principals that have been universally accepted as integral to western law and justice for hundreds of years - equality, liberty, and equity - and then to determine if, in light of changing facts and values, the ancient legal rules may now be found to be wanting.
Unlike the law of international treaties, national constitutions, and municipal statutes, the common law is developed by judges through their use of reasoned judgment. To be sure, the common law values consistency and certainty, so that persons may order their lives in harmony with rights and obligations that they know. But the common law also values reason, fairness, and flexibility. As judges make the common law, judges may unmake it if they later come to believe that they erred. Legislators who disagree with the decisions of common law judges can try to overrule them. Judges, of course, know that they may unmake what they have made; they know that legislatures may revise their decisions for them. But the very fact that their own mistakes can be undone in relatively painless and swift ways encourages common law judges to be innovative and sensitive to those arguments about what is reasonable, fair, right and just that shine through the light of a kaleidoscopic world of changing facts and morals and values.
As we have seen, the legal thinghood of nonhuman animals from the gnat to the chimpanzee is as ancient and as deeply woven into the fabric of our law as is any legal rule. But I suggest that this ancient legal rule, as applied to chimpanzees, so outright contradicts the overarching and, if I may, sacred principles of equality, liberty, equity, and justice that it can be affirmed only with the greatest of difficulties.
The writer, Edith Hamilton once reminded us of the plight of human slaves before the time of the Greek Stoics of the second century B.C. And the words she chose to describe their plight described the effects of the legal rule that excludes all nonhuman animals, even chimpanzees, from eligibility for even the most fundamental legal rights. "Everywhere," she said, "everywhere "the way of life depended upon them. One cannot say that they were accepted as such, for there was no acceptance. Everyone used them; no one paid attention to them ... what must be remembered is that the Greeks were the first who thought about slavery. To think about it was to condemn it."
Yet recall that the abomination of human slavery was finally abolished in the West just in the last century. It continues in some countries to this day. The first thinking about the justice of the legal thinghood of nonhuman animals occurred just as slavery was flickering in the West. To date it has resulted mostly in the enactment of pathetically inadequate anticruelty statutes. But as the scientific evidence of the true natures of such nonhuman animals as chimpanzees continues to mount, catalyzed by the work of Dr. Goodall, that thinking will be its undoing. For to think about the legal thinghood of such a creature as a chimpanzees will be finally, finally, to condemn it.
This process has commenced. At its deepest levels, modern law has begun slowly to disassemble the incommensurability between all human and all nonhuman animals both from the top down and the bottom up. The intrinsic value of human beings is now seen in law as commensurable with other values. This has been reflected, for examples, in the enactment of wrongful death statues. These statutes were intended to alter the legal rule that the loss of human life, incommensurable as it was with anything else, could never be compensated by money. Meanwhile the lives of at least some nonhuman animals have begun to be infused with a degree of intrinsic and not merely instrumental value. The Preamble to the United Nations World Charter for Nature states that "every form of life is unique, warranting respect regardless of its worth to man." Respected international scholars have suggested that the legal right of individual whales to life may be becoming, after a century of development, a part of binding international law. While interpreting our own Endangered Species Act, the United States Supreme Court was guided in a decision by the declaration of the Congress that endangered species were of "incalculable value."
Such overarching values of Western law as equality and liberty strongly support the modification of the legal thinghood of chimpanzees. It is an axiom of Western justice that likes should be treated alike. To a large degree, this principle of equality is the marker by which the fairness and justice of any Western legal system is measured. Equality lies at the center of many of our constitutional liberties. This is because equality acts as a barrier to arbitrary classifications and arbitrariness is the antithesis of the reasoned judgment Western law and justice demand. However, it is actual likeness and not false assumptions or beliefs about likeness that is the measure of equality. Dr. Goodall has briefly but compellingly demonstrated that Flo and Fifi and Frodo and Fax are creatures whose natures and interests are actually like the natures and interests of human beings in ways relevant to what such fundamental legal rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty protect. It is arbitrary and a breach of the fundamental principle of equality to deny them these rights merely because they are not human beings.
Similarly, after sad and terrible experiences with the destruction of liberty from Nazi Germany to Bosnia, the international community has firmly rejected the notion that fundamental human rights cannot be derived from such fundamental qualities of the human body and personality as our consciousness, our abilities to suffer, and our natural tendencies to live in families, that such interests as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, must be protected by legal rights. and that such practices as torture and slavery must be prohibited as international jus cogens norms that can never be waived or excused.
We have reached these kinds of crossroads before. The emergence of the discipline of child development as a social science led to changing views about the natures of childhood and children and spurred action toward the development of the fundamental legal rights of children. Better understandings of the nature of fetal development helped lead after World War II to the rapid recognition of the legal personhood of human fetuses in tort law. The emergence of scientific disciplines as ethology, genetics and cognitive psychology, all of which have been influenced by Dr. Goodall's work, have helped clarify that fundamental chimpanzee interests exist that justify such fundamental legal rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty in a legal system underpinned by the values of equality, liberty, and equity.
Of course, we can never know for certain that Flo and Fifi and Frodo and Fax experience inner worlds similar to our own. But anyone who has struggled with the protean nature of consciousness itself understands that we can never even know for sure that other humans are conscious. Thus we are left, as Professor Martha Nussbaum has written, with "a choice only between a generous construction and a mean spirited construction." The construction we choose will not only have a profound impact upon the lives and families of Flo and Fifi and Frodo and Fax, but upon our own lives and families, as it will help determine the value that we place upon our own fundamental principles of justice.
Dr. Goodall:
One short story, a symbolic short story, to bring it back so that the chimpanzee can have the last word. It’s the story of a chimp who was captured in Africa when he was about two years old. His mother was shot. He was sent over to a lab in the United States. He was one of one of the lucky ones. He was rescued from the lab and put on an island in a zoo very near here - Land Country Safari in West Palm Beach. His name was Old Man and he was put on an island with three females who’d been in circuses and labs. A young man was hired, Mark Cusano, to look after this little group of chimps, as well as the others. He was told, "Don’t go near those four. They hate people they’re very dangerous. They’ll kill you." For a while, he paddled in one of those little paddleboats to the island where he would throw food out for the chimps. But he began to watch them. He saw how joyous they were when he would appear with the food. They would embrace and kiss and hold hands. And then a baby was born, Old Man’s baby. And he saw how gentle Old Man was. And he thought to himself, "How can I possibly care for these amazing creatures if I don’t have some kind of relationship with them?" So every day he went a little closer and one day he held a banana out from the boat and Old Man took it from his hands. He said, "Jane, I know how you felt when David Graybeard first took a banana from you."
And the day came when he stepped onto the shore. And one day Old Man allowed him to groom him and then they began to play. So a friendship grew up. The females stayed back, but they didn’t do anything. One day soon after this, he was cleaning the island. It was raining and muddy. He slipped and frightened the baby. The baby screamed. The mother rushed to defend her child, as mothers will, and leapt onto Mark and bit his neck. He felt the blood run down. The other two females came to help their friend. One bit his wrist. One bit his leg. He’d been attacked before but never like this. And then as he lay there on the ground with these females biting him, he looked up and he saw Old Man charging across the island with all his hair bristling and his lips bunched and he thought, "Well, my last hours has come. My last minute has come." But what happened, Old Man charged in and he physically pulled each of those females away and he kept them off Mark as he painfully dragged himself to the boat. And when he came out of the hospital, some days later, I saw him. And he said "Jane, you know there’s no question but that Old Man saved my life." And it’s a symbolic story for me because if a chimpanzee who’s been abused by people, mistreated by people, can reach out across this imaginary gap between his species and ours, to help a human friend in time of need, then surely we humans with our greater capacity for understanding and our greater capacity for compassion, can do the same for chimpanzees in their time of need. And that is the chimpanzees’ message to all of you here today. Thank you for giving us for giving us the chance to share these thoughts with you.