.

[I]f only Teddy could talk. Then we would know what he thinks of the politicians and activists and drivers who argue about his future. He could expound on Manhattan traffic, its pollution, the cold, the heat, the hay and the shrieking girls clutching dolls who pet his nose on Grand Army Plaza.

Teddy is 11 years old, a Percheron-cross draft horse from Pennsylvania’s Amish country — a pinto with a coat the color of warm cocoa and whipped cream. He has blinders on. But even those in the know cannot foresee how long it will take for Mayor Bill de Blasio to fulfill his campaign promise to banish the Central Park carriage horses as his first legislative act.

The City Council, now led by the sponsor of a 2010 bill to ban horse-drawn carriages, Melissa Mark-Viverito, has yet to discuss the issue.

Activists who want to end the carriage-horse trade contributed more than $1.3 million to help elect Mr. de Blasio and council members who supported a ban with a solution: Replace all the horses with a fleet of antique-styleelectric cars to serve tourists, not just in Central Park, but all over the city.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has applauded the mayor for his stance. “The A.S.P.C.A. does not oppose horses working,” said Matthew E. Bershadker, the organization’s president. “We oppose horses pulling carriages in New York City. These horses are surrounded by buses, cabs and traffic. We believe that it no longer is, or never was, quaint or romantic.”

Fighting for survival, the Horse and Carriage Association of New York is working with the Cavalry Group, an animal-owners’ rights group. It has put up a website and thrown open stable doors to scrutiny.

Cornelius Byrne, 66, whose stable on West 37th Street houses 17 horses, said the industry cannot seem to win. “We can say forever that we take care of them,” Mr. Byrne said. “And these animal activists, they seem to be able to say, ‘No, you don’t.’ It goes on forever, this argument: ‘Are the horses happy?’ ”

Amid bitter accusations and assumptions from both sides, Teddy goes to work.

“You guys want a ride?” Teddy’s driver, Angel Hernandez, 28, casually asked passers-by last Sunday from the hack line on 59th Street, across from the Plaza Hotel.

Twenty minutes and $50 later, Mr. Hernandez was snapping pictures of a mother and daughter from London, who had arrived at Kennedy Airport at 2 p.m., dropped their bags at their hotel and come straight to the carriages.

“Ban them?” the mother, Lesley Fabri, 60, exclaimed after her ride. “That’s the whole reason we’re here!”

She came, she said, because she was enchanted by the scenes in the Robert Redford movie “Barefoot in the Park,” while her 25-year-old daughter, Nadia, was drawn by the carriages on the “Real Housewives” reality series. The women planned to return for a night ride.

Opponents of the carriage horses say that the industry is romanticism run amok. Drivers, stable owners and stable hands call it a career.

“I don’t think Bill de Blasio knows what he’s doing,” Mr. Hernandez said softly on Sunday, after watching a toddler grin with delight from petting Teddy. “Their main point is that we abuse the horses. At the end of the day, I make sure he’s O.K. first,” he said, nodding to Teddy, “and then I go home. That’s not abuse.”

Teddy works about nine hours on alternate days, Mr. Hernandez said, which includes the 20-minute commute from the Clinton Park Stables on West 52nd Street between 11th and 12th Avenues. At 9:20 a.m. that Sunday, with his white-and-magenta bridle plume bobbing, Teddy clip-clopped to the park, passing the showrooms of Mercedes and Mini.

Mr. Hernandez and Teddy had eight fares for the day, excellent for a post-holiday Sunday. Waiting on the hack line, Mr. Hernandez fed Teddy oat pellets and corn, and allowed tourists to feed Teddy carrots. He gave Teddy a manicure of sorts, applying black polish to his hooves. The front left hoof bore his number: 3527.

Mr. Hernandez himself earns $10 for every 20-minute ride, and $20 for the less common 40-minute rides that cost $90. He keeps whatever tips he gets. The rest he gives to Teddy’s owner, Angelo Collura.

Mr. Hernandez first rode horses as a child on his grandmother’s farm outside Mexico City. He came to New York as a teenager and worked for nearly five years as a stableman before studying to become a driver like his uncle. He and his wife, who works in a restaurant, live in the Bronx with their two children. After work, he goes to school to become an electrician.

“It’s hard to get another job,” Mr. Hernandez said, wearing faux-diamond studs in both ears. “It’s not like if I leave this, I’ll grab another job right away.”

Mr. Hernandez is one of 150 drivers operating 220 registered horses for 68 carriage medallions. The proposed ban would require the owners to relinquish their horses to rescue farms with the promise the horses would never work again.

“They are all bred to pull; their main and sole purpose is to pull,” said Stephen Malone, an owner, driver and spokesman for the carriage association.

Mr. Malone has been driving horses in the city for 26 years; his father did it before him. He is galled that an activist group is telling him he cannot run his business and then offering an alternative, the electric car, that could cost him $150,000 to buy outright.

“It’s an elitist class battle that we’re fighting,” Mr. Malone said. “If the bill passes we’ll have no choice but to take legal action.”

But Mr. de Blasio and Ms. Mark-Viverito have said the horses no longer have a place in New York.

“It’s over,” Mr. de Blasio said two days before taking office. Last week, Marti Adams, a spokeswoman for him, said, “The administration is looking at the most effective way to ban horse carriages, whether legislatively or other routes, and will move forward in the coming weeks.”

“It’s long past time we end these practices which treat the horses so cruelly,” Ms. Mark-Viverito said in a statement last week.Edita Birnkrant, the New York director of Friends of Animals, likened the horses’ working conditions to prison.

“They are shackled into their carriages, pulling through streets of a chaotic unnatural environment and go back to their cells,” she said. “They need the ability to graze and roam freely. They never get that in New York. They live a life of total confinement, day after day.”

Mr. Malone counters that the horses get their exercise by pulling in the park. And while they do not get to graze daily, horses take a mandated vacation to a farm for no less than five weeks each year. In 2010, the Council enacted legislation to improve the horses’ working conditions and increase drivers’ pay.

Horses are not allowed to work in temperatures below 18 degrees and above 90, but that does not factor in wind chill, humidity or pavement temperature. Their stalls must be at least 64 square feet. At all four carriage horse stables in Manhattan, each stall has a rubber mat and an inspection certificate, citing recent veterinary checkups. There are sprinklers in all the stables, fans and water hoses for drinking.

Dr. Harry Werner, a veterinarian in North Granby, Conn., and a past president of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, said he was asked by the carriage horse association to make an assessment of the horses’ working conditions in February 2010. Dr. Werner said that he and three other veterinarians paid their own expenses to observe four of the five stables then in operation.

“Based on that inspection, I found no evidence whatsoever of inhumane conditions, neglect or cruelty in any aspect,” Dr. Werner said last week, adding that he does not take a position on carriage horses. “The demeanor of the horses was, to a one, that of a contented horse.”

“What happens is that people anthropomorphize,” he said. “They see a circumstance where they wouldn’t want to work in it, and think a horse wouldn’t work in it.”

Mr. Hernandez said he takes his cues from Teddy. If he does not want to work that day, his head will be down. In that case, Mr. Hernandez would take out Shaggy, 18, another horse owned by Mr. Collura. The owner’s third horse, Rocky, also 18, has been on extended vacation for the last six months in Pennsylvania.

The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene monitors horse furloughs.

The A.S.P.C.A., until Jan. 1, had been the primary agent responsible for enforcement of animal anti-cruelty laws. But its 18 officers were cut to four, and the Police Department has taken over enforcement. A driver was arrested in December for overworking an injured horse, who was shown to have thrush, a common hoof infection.

Since 2011, there have been seven reported incidents involving horses: two collapsing and one dying, two getting spooked, and two involved in accidents with a taxi and an S.U.V.

Opponents cite these occurrences as evidence that the industry cares more about money than the animals. Stephen Nislick, who retired in 2012 as chief executive of the real estate company Edison Properties, founded the anti-carriage horse group NYClass, (New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets) in 2008, along with Ed Sayres, a former president of the A.S.P.C.A. Although a frequent critic of the stables, Mr. Nislick has not visited them. From seeing pictures, he said, he could tell the stalls were inadequate for sleeping and turning around, and that he believes the majority of the drivers and owners are only interested in working their horses.

“Do they care? Some of them care,” Mr. Nislick said. “Do the preponderance of them care? No. Can it be regulated? No.”

“It has nothing to do with horses,” said Kieran Kelly, 47, as he started his day at the Clinton Park Stables on West 52nd Street, sidestepping a pedicab driver from the garage next door. “It’s about politics.”

That two of the four stables happen to be sitting on prime real estate across from the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, near the Hudson Yards development, does not seem to be a coincidence to their owners.

Mr. Nislick and Wendy K. Neu, the chief executive of a real estate and recycling firm and an active NYClass board member, were major contributors to New York City Not For Sale, or NYCN4S, a group that spent $1,141,305 from April to August last year to oppose the mayoral candidacy of Christine C. Quinn. Ms. Quinn did not support a ban of the carriage horses. NYClass also contributed to NYCN4S’s campaign, and provided volunteers to the anti-Quinn effort.

The A.S.P.C.A. gave $50,000 to NYClass in the last year, records show. Mr. Bershadker, the A.S.P.C.A. president, said that the money was a grant earmarked for electric car research.

NYClass spent $202,225 in the four days before the primary in September, state campaign finance records show.

Mr. Nislick and Ms. Neu, who had supported Ms. Quinn in 2009, instead backed Mr. de Blasio.

“There’s so many people out there that do care about these issues and do see the connection between how we treat animals and how we treat people,” Ms. Neu said.

Mr. Nislick insisted that he was not after the stable owners’ real estate. The issue, he said, was the horses.

NYClass has paid $475,000 for Jason Wenig, a car designer based in Florida, to create a prototype for an antique-style car. It won’t be ready until the end of April, Mr. Nislick said, adding that it could be until the end of the year before his group finds space to build the cars in the city. Depending on how fast 68 cars could be rolled out, the horses would be phased out if a ban is passed.

Where the horses would go is the elephant in the room. “We will personally guarantee the rescue of any remaining horses,” Mr. Nislick said.

Owners like Colm and Ian McKeever, who are brothers, recoil at the prospect of giving their horses to the very entity that wants to abolish their business.

“It is excruciatingly expensive to keep a retired horse,” said Dr. Lisa A. Fortier, a professor of large animal surgery at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. She also warned that some horses could end up being slaughtered. “A lot of those farms are closing down,” she said, “and that’s a lot worse fate than walking in New York City.”

Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States, said that his organization would place 40 to 50 of the 220 horses in sanctuaries. “It will be a challenge,” he said, “but it’s finite. If you continue the carriage-horse industry you have horses, for an indefinite time, being cast off and put at risk.”

At a farm in Oxford, N.J., Mr. Nislick keeps a former carriage horse, Chance, which he bought from a rescue farm in 2008 through a private investigator. Mr. Nislick, 69, said because of mistreatment during its working life, the horse had founder, a serious hoof condition, when he got it, and was going to be killed. However, the owner of the rescue farm, Christy Sheidy, said the horse had not been injured and was not in danger of being put down.

Some weekends, anti-carriage horse protesters shout expletives at the drivers in the hack line. On Sunday, they were missing. Instead, children and their parents celebrated birthdays and couples kissed in coaches after springing for the too-brief, but tranquil, ride.

A gaggle of eight girls, who took a stretch limousine in from Long Island for a 10th-birthday party, took rides before heading to the American Girl store nearby. When told the horses may go away, 9-year-old Sydney Lazare shook her head. “That is awful,” she said, indignantly, “What kind of a world is this?”

Another friend shrugged and said, “Can we go back to the limo now?”

Piper Augut, 10, from Yarmouth, Mass., had chosen Teddy because of her love for spotted horses. As the carriage turned off Avenue of the Americas into Central Park, Mr. Hernandez told Piper and her parents about movie scenes filmed there (“Home Alone 2,” “Love Story”).

Teddy passed the charging stations for the park’s hybrid vehicles.

The only thing that seemed to bother Teddy during nine hours of work on Sunday was when his stablemate tailgated him on 55th Street. He jerked the reins.

It was just before 6 p.m. when he pulled into the stable. Mr. Hernandez and a stableman unfastened the carriage. As soon as Mr. Hernandez took off the harness and bridle, Teddy bounded down the hallway to his stall and went straight for the hay. He was home.

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_Just before 4 p.m. on Oct. 10, Steven Wise pulled his rental car in front of a multiacre compound on State Highway 30 near the tiny Adirondack hamlet of Gloversville, N.Y., and considered his next move. For the past 15 minutes, Wise had been slowly driving the perimeter of the property, trying to get a better read on the place. An assortment of transport trailers — for horses and livestock, cars, boats and snowmobiles — cluttered a front lot beside a single-story business office with the sign “Circle L Trailer Sales” set above the door. At the rear of the grounds was a barn-size, aluminum-sided shed, all its doors closed, the few small windows covered in thick plastic.

With each pass, he looked to see if anybody was on the grounds but could find no one. A number of times Wise pulled off the road and called his office to check whether he had the right place. It wasn’t until he finally spotted a distant filigree of deer antlers that he knew for certain. The owner of Circle L Trailer, Wise had read, runs a side enterprise known as Santa’s Hitching Post, which rents out a herd of reindeer for holiday events and TV spots, including commercials for Macy’s and Mercedes-Benz.

After spotting a man tightening bolts on one of the trailer hitches, Wise paused to explain his strategy to me and the documentary filmmaker Chris Hegedus, who had a video camera. “I’m just going to say that I heard their reindeer were on TV,” Wise said. “I happened to be driving by and thought I might be able to see them in person.”

The repairman told Wise that the owner wasn’t on the premises that day. Wise mustered as many reindeer questions as he could, then got to his real agenda.

“So,” he finally asked, doing his best excited-tourist voice. “Do you keep any other animals around here?”

“Yeah,” the man answered, nodding toward the aluminum-sided shed. “In there. Name’s Tommy.”

Inside the shed, the repairman inched open a small door as though to first test the mood within. A rancid milk-musk odor wafted forth and with it the sight of an adult chimpanzee, crouched inside a small steel-mesh cell. Some plastic toys and bits of soiled bedding were strewn behind him. The only visible light emanated from a small portable TV on a stand outside his bars, tuned to what appeared to be a nature show.

“It’s too bad you can’t see him when he’s out in the jungle,” the repairman said, pointing to a passageway nearby, which opened onto an enclosure that housed a playground jungle gym. “At least he gets fresh air out there.”

Tommy’s original owner, we learned, was named Dave Sabo, the one-time proprietor of a troupe of performing circus chimps. The repairman said that Sabo raised Tommy, who appears to be in his 20s, from infancy. Sabo, who had been living for a number of years in a trailer on the grounds of Circle L Trailer, recently died.

“He’s back in there now somewhere,” the repairman said, quickly tracing with his hands what seemed to be the outline of an urn of ashes. “In a room next to Tommy’s.”

On the way back out to the car, Wise paused.

“I’m not going to be able get that image out of my mind,” he said, his voice quavering. “How would you describe that cage? He’s in a dungeon, right? That’s a dungeon.”

•••

Seven weeks later, on Dec. 2, Wise, a 63-year-old legal scholar in the field of animal law, strode with his fellow lawyers, Natalie Prosin, the executive director of the Nonhuman Rights Project (Nh.R.P.), and Elizabeth Stein, a New York-based animal-law expert, into the clerk’s office of the Fulton County Courthouse in Johnstown, N.Y., 10 miles from Circle L Trailer Sales, wielding multiple copies of a legal document the likes of which had never been seen in any of the world’s courts, no less conservative Fulton County’s.

Under the partial heading “The Nonhuman Rights Project Inc. on behalf of Tommy,” the legal memo and petition included among their 106 pages a detailed account of the “petitioner’s” solitary confinement “in a small, dank, cement cage in a cavernous dark shed”; and a series of nine affidavits gathered from leading primatologists around the world, each one detailing the cognitive capabilities of a being like Tommy, thereby underscoring the physical and psychological ravages he suffers in confinement.

Along with chimps, the Nh.R.P. plans to file similar lawsuits on behalf of other members of the great ape family (bonobos, orangutans and gorillas) as well as dolphins, orcas, belugas, elephants and African gray parrots — all beings with higher-order cognitive abilities. Chimps were chosen as the first clients because of the abundance of research on their cognitive sophistication, and the fact that, at present, there are sanctuaries lined up to take in the plaintiffs should they win their freedom. (There are no such facilities for dolphins or orcas in the United States, and the two preferred sanctuaries for elephants were full.)

“Like humans,” the legal memo reads, “chimpanzees have a concept of their personal past and future . . . they suffer the pain of not being able to fulfill their needs or move around as they wish; [and] they suffer the pain of anticipating never-ending confinement.” What Tommy could never have anticipated, of course, huddled just up the road that morning in his dark, dank cell, was that he was about to make legal history: The first nonhuman primate to ever sue a human captor in an attempt to gain his own freedom.

Animals Are Persons Too

This short documentary follows the lawyer Steven Wise’s effort to break down the legal wall that separates animals from humans.   Credit By Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker on Publish Date April 23, 2014

Animals are hardly strangers to our courts, only to the brand of justice meted out there. In the opening chapters of Wise’s first book, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals,” published in 2000, he cites the curious and now largely forgotten history, dating at least back to the Middle Ages, of humans putting animals on trial for their perceived offenses, everything from murderous pigs, to grain-filching rats and insects, to flocks of sparrows disrupting church services with their chirping. Such proceedings — often elaborate, drawn-out courtroom dramas in which the defendants were ostensibly accorded the same legal rights as humans, right down to being appointed the best available lawyers — were essentially allegorical rituals, a means of expunging evil and restoring some sense of order to a random and disorderly world.

Among the most common nonhuman defendants cited by the British historian E. P. Evans in his 1906 book, “The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals,” were pigs. Allowed to freely roam the narrow, winding streets of medieval villages, pigs and sows sometimes maimed and killed infants and young children. The “guilty” party would regularly be brought before a magistrate to be tried and sentenced and then publicly tortured and executed in the town square, often while being hung upside down, because, as Wise explains it in “Rattling the Cage,” “a beast . . . who killed a human reversed the ordained hierarchy. . . . Inversion set the world right again.”

The practice of enlisting animals as unwitting courtroom actors in order to reinforce our own sense of justice is not as outmoded as you might think. As recently as 1906, the year Evans’s book appeared, a father-son criminal team and the attack dog they trained to be their accomplice were prosecuted in Switzerland for robbery and murder. In a trial reported in L’Écho de Paris and The New York Herald, the two men were found guilty and received life in prison. The dog — without whom, the court determined, the crime couldn’t have been committed — was condemned to death.

It has been only in the last 30 years or so that a distinct field of animal law — that is laws and legal theory expressly for and about nonhuman animals — has emerged. When Wise taught his first animal-law class in 1990 at Vermont Law School, he knew of only two others of its kind in the country. Today there are well over a hundred. Yet while animal-welfare laws and endangered-species statutes now abound, the primary thrust of such legislation remains the regulation of our various uses and abuses of animals, including food production, medical research, entertainment and private ownership. The fundamental legal status of nonhumans, however, as things, as property, with no rights of their own, has remained unchanged.

Wise has devoted himself to subverting that hierarchy by moving the animal from the defendant’s table to the plaintiff’s. Not in order to cast cognitively advanced beings like Tommy in a human light, but rather to ask a judge to recognize them as individuals in and of themselves: Beings entitled to something that, without us, no wild animal would ever require — the fundamental right, at least, not to be wrongfully imprisoned.

Tracking down captive backyard chimps as clients is not the sort of career Wise imagined for himself. But then neither was law. A self-described apolitical lead singer in a rock band who thought he would have a career in music, Wise’s increasing involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement while at the College of William and Mary began to stoke a growing interest in social activism.

__________

Essentially a wrong is a wrong is a wrong. —Eds

___________

Over lunch in Manhattan one afternoon a few weeks after finding Tommy, Wise told me he thought that he was going to be a doctor, but he didn’t get into medical school. He ended up working as a lab technician in Boston, all the while continuing his antiwar activities. “Then one day, I thought to myself, You know, I think I want to be a lawyer,” he said. “I had become really interested in issues of social justice.”

Several years after graduating from Boston University School of Law, he sat down with a copy of Peter Singer’s seminal work, “Animal Liberation,” and got the “jolt” that has directed his passions ever since. “It was a total epiphany,” he recalled. “I just had never thought about what was going on out there with our treatment of animals. First, I became a vegetarian. Then I thought to myself, Well, if I’m interested in social justice, I can’t imagine beings who are being more brutalized than nonhuman animals. People could do whatever they wanted with them and were doing whatever they wanted with them. Nonhuman animals had no rights at all. I couldn’t think of any other place where my participation could do more good. I suddenly realized this is why I became a lawyer.”

He dedicated himself to getting a better sense of the general arc over the course of history of human thinking about animals. From Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being that ranked animals, because they lacked reason, below man; to René Descartes’s view of animals as complex but soulless automatons; to Immanuel Kant’s argument against cruelty to animals, not because of any specific obligation to them but because such cruelty had an adverse effect on human relations; to the assertion by the 19th-century British philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham that the only arbiter of how we treat animals “is not ‘can they reason?’ nor ‘can they talk?’ but ‘can they suffer?’ ” a view that would profoundly influence the work of modern-day animal rights thinkers like Peter Singer.

In 1991, Wise filed an early animal rights lawsuit that both underscored the difficulty of the challenge he would be facing and helped him hone his legal strategy. The case, filed in the United States District Court of Massachusetts against the New England Aquarium, was on behalf of Kama, a 6-year-old dolphin, and several animal rights groups that objected to the aquarium’s transfer of Kama to the Navy for training at the Naval Ocean Systems Center in Hawaii, a violation, the suit claimed, of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The judge immediately dismissed Kama’s part of the suit due to insufficient “standing”: the legal requirement that a plaintiff personally speak to the injury that has been done to him or her by the defendant and then show that such harm can be properly redressed by the court — a requirement that Kama, of course, could never have met.

A nonhuman is, in fact, so invisible in a court of law that the only way such a creature can seek redress is if the human plaintiffs representing that animal can prove that the injury done to it has in some way injured them. After several days of deliberation, the judge ultimately decided that the humans, too, had failed to adequately prove injury and threw out their part of the suit on the basis of standing as well.

“The lawyer for the aquarium was so outraged,” Wise said. “He kept saying, ‘Judge, our own dolphin is suing us!’ And I understand that outrage. He felt: ‘We own this. This is completely ours, and what is ours is now claiming we can’t do something to it?’ But what these cases made me realize is that the issue wasn’t really about standing at all. What lawyers and judges had been calling an ‘animal-standing problem’ was really a ‘not-being-a-legal-person problem.’ We could show the animals had been injured, that the defendants were responsible and that the judge could remedy it. But because animals are not legal persons, they don’t even have the capacity to sue in the first place. They’re totally invisible. I knew if I was going to begin breaking down the wall that divides human and nonhumans, I first had to find a way around this issue of personhood.”

Steven Wise at his home office in Coral Springs, Fla. CreditChip Litherland for The New York Times

A few years later, while continuing to lecture in animal jurisprudence to law students, Wise revisited the famous case of Somerset v. Stewart. In 1772, the chief justice of the English Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield, issued a writ of habeas corpus — a court order requiring that a prisoner be brought before a judge by his or her captor in order to rule on the legality of that prisoner’s detainment — on behalf of a slave named James Somerset, a being as invisible then to the law as any nonhuman. Mansfield ultimately decided to free Somerset from his Scottish-American owner, Charles Stewart — a landmark decision that would drive one of the first wedges into the wall then dividing black and white human beings from one another.

The Somerset case soon had Wise exploring other habeas corpus cases. He noted that many of them were filed on behalf of those unable to personally appear in court: prisoners, for example, or children, or mentally incapacitated adults. Habeas corpus cases, Wise realized, have the most relaxed standing requirements, precisely because the circumstances necessitate that a proxy like Wise plead the plaintiff’s case.

As Wise started to formulate it further, he saw habeas corpus as a form of redress for the denial of a “legal person’s” right to bodily liberty, not necessarily a “human being’s.” At lunch, he outlined a broad spectrum of cases in which nonhumans have been held to be legal persons, like ships, corporations, partnerships and states. He invoked cases in India in which the holy book of the Sikhs was deemed a legal person, as well as Hindu idols. He spoke of a dispute between the Crown of New Zealand and the Maori tribe in which a river was held to be a legal person.

“A legal person is not synonymous with a human being,” he told me. “A legal person is an entity that the legal system considers important enough so that it is visible and [has] interests” and also “certain kinds of rights. I often ask my students: ‘You tell me, why should a human have fundamental rights?’ There’s not a single person on earth I’ve ever put that question to who can answer that without referring to certain qualities that a human has.”

In his animal-law classes, Wise told me, he has his students consider the actual case of a 4-month-old anencephalic baby — that is, a child born without a complete brain. Her brain stem allows her to breathe and digest, but she has no consciousness or sentience. No feelings or awareness whatsoever. He asks the class why we can’t do anything we want with such a child, even eat her.

“We’re all instantly repelled by that, of course,” Wise said. When he asked his students that question, they “get all tied up in knots and say things like ‘because she has a soul’ or ‘all life is sacred.’ I say: ‘I’m sorry, we’re not talking about any characteristics here. It’s that she has the form of a human being.’ Now I’m not saying that a court or legislature can’t say that just having a human form is in and of itself a sufficient condition for rights. I’m simply saying that it’s irrational. . . . Why is a human individual with no cognitive abilities whatsoever a legal person with rights, while cognitively complex beings such as Tommy, or a dolphin, or an orca are things with no rights at all?”

The other advantage of habeas corpus cases, Wise said he realized, is they allow him to circumvent federal courts, where judges tend to rule in accordance with what they perceive to be the original intentions of pre-existing statutes and laws. State courts, by contrast, where almost all habeas corpus cases are heard, are the home of common law — what Wise often characterizes as a breeding ground of ever-evolving laws where for the past 800 years judges have been making decisions based more on the available evidence and on broader principles like equality and liberty and what is morally right. The common law is the realm in which Wise feels he has the best chance to succeed. “I have to present an argument that a judge can grasp quickly. I have to go bang, bang, bang, detailing the distinct qualities of my clients. We’re definitely asking a judge to make a leap of faith here; what some might see as a quantum leap. My job is to make it seem as small as possible.”

No recent case better underscores the unique nature of Wise’s present endeavor than the one that seemed, at first, to most resemble it. In October 2011, despite Wise’s objections, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit on behalf of five orcas at SeaWorld San Diego and SeaWorld Orlando, accusing the theme park of violating the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. The suit was dismissed by Judge Jeffrey Miller of the U.S. District Court for Southern California, who wrote in his ruling that “the only reasonable interpretation of the 13th Amendment’s plain language is that it applies to persons, and not to nonpersons such as orcas.”

Wise was furious over what he considered the grossly premature timing of PETA’s case. After the judge’s decision, Wise called a PETA lawyer to “share his thoughts” with him. Natalie Prosin was on that call too. “She really let me have it afterward,” Wise said. “She said, ‘You acted like you were the professor and he was your student, lecturing him for over 30 minutes on why his case was so bad.’ I said: ‘I know. And frankly 30 minutes wasn’t nearly enough.’ It was idiotic to invoke the Constitution the first time around. You know maybe in 50 years, after you’ve already laid a foundation of courts recognizing that nonhuman animals could be considered legal persons under the common law. That’s precisely why we’re avoiding the federal courts.”

As hasty an overreach as Wise thought PETA’s legal gambit to be, the Nh.R.P.’s has been plodding and precise. As many as 70 volunteers have been working over the past four years on different facets of his legal offensive. Perhaps the most important is the Nh.R.P.’s Science Working Group, which collaborates with Dr. Lori Marino, an Emory University specialist in the cetacean brain and the evolution of animal intelligence. This group is assigned the task of gathering available research and expert testimony on the cognitive abilities of the plaintiffs that the Nh.R.P. plans to represent.

As recently as 10 years ago Wise’s effort would have been laughed out of a courtroom. What has made his efforts viable now, however, is in part the advanced neurological and genetic research, which has shown that animals like chimpanzees, orcas and elephants possess self-awareness, self-determination and a sense of both the past and future. They have their own distinct languages, complex social interactions and tool use. They grieve and empathize and pass knowledge from one generation to the next. The very same attributes, in other words, that we once believed distinguished us from other animals. Wise intends to wield this evidence in mounting the case that his clients are “autonomous beings,” ones who are able, as Wise defines that term, “to freely choose, to self-determine, to make their own decisions without acting from reflex or innate behavior.” He sees these abilities as the minimum sufficient requirement for legal personhood.

Another element of the Nh.R.P.’s strategy is the Legal Working Group, which selects optimal jurisdictions for their lawyers and then finds potential clients there, a reversal of the typical process in which a lawyer has a client and then argues their case in whatever jurisdiction that client happens to live. For the first set of cases, the 20 or so members of the Legal Working Group scoured the records on the habeas corpus rulings of all 50 states and composed memos, each at least 15 pages, before finally settling on New York, where seven privately owned chimps were being held throughout the state.

Wise, Prosin, Stein and Monica Miller, another lawyer, filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of four of the chimps (the three others died before the Nh.R.P. could do so). The day after Tommy’s case was presented, the lawyers were in Niagara Falls, N.Y., filing on behalf of a chimp there named Kiko. Two days after that, they traveled to Riverhead, N.Y., on Long Island, to file a third suit in the name of Leo and Hercules, two chimps being kept at Stony Brook University for studies on human locomotion.

In addition, the Nh.R.P.’s Sociological Working Group has been collecting whatever information it can on the judges within a prospective jurisdiction, everything from their sex, age and political party to their leisure activities and whether or not they own pets. It’s all by way of getting the best sense of the kind of judge the plaintiffs might be facing.

The hope is that they will get what Wise calls a “substantive-principles judge,” one not as bound by precedent, who makes what he or she believes is a just decision, regardless of what ramifications the decision may have. A judge like Lord Mansfield, who before setting the slave James Somerset free, said, “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum” (“Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall”).

“I’m looking for a Lord Mansfield,” Wise told me, “but as I often tell my students, be careful what you wish for. You may get a principles judge, and it turns out that the principles the judge holds are the ones that make him say: ‘You lose. I don’t agree with your principles. I agree with the principle that God created humans, and we all have souls, and we’re special, and nonhuman animals do not and so aren’t.’ And in that case you’ve just shot yourself in the head.”

Of course, a number of people both in the legal world and beyond find the very premise of seeking legal personhood for animals an oxymoron. There are, they assert, already ample protections available under current animal-welfare laws, on both the federal and state levels, without having to go down the practically and philosophically fraught path of extending a human right to a nonhuman.

Richard Epstein, a New York University law professor, is an outspoken critic of Wise and of the notion of extending rights to animals. He bridles at what he sees as the potential practical consequences of such an outcome, a slippery-slope effect that would eventually abolish long-established institutions like the agriculture-and-food-production industry.  “[T]here would be nothing left of human society,” Epstein once asserted in a 1999 essay, “The Next Rights Revolution?” “if we treated animals not as property but as independent holders of rights.” He also considers Wise’s legal approach to be “completely misguided.”

“Steven is extremely ingenious,” Epstein told me in his N.Y.U. office in January. “I don’t think he’s a great intellect. He’s a man of tremendous persistence. He just doesn’t think there is any serious argument that can be made on the other side. It’s like watching someone with tunnel vision. . . . My attitude is this: There are two ways to think about it. He thinks of it as rights. I think about it as protection. You can guarantee the things he’s seeking through animal-protection legislation without calling them rights. I mean, you may want to enforce the laws better. I just think the argument of making animals into sort of human beings is what’s crazy.”

But Wise contends that present forms of protection are effectively unenforceable in a case like Tommy’s, primarily because under current animal-welfare laws on both the state and federal levels, it isn’t illegal to keep a chimp in a cage, Tommy’s present owner, Pat Lavery, has said that Tommy’s cage is legal and inspected annually. In those cases in which cages do not meet proper standards, animals are rarely taken from their owners because they’re still considered private property.

Ultimately, Wise is not interested in trying to distinguish between bad and better forms of captivity. What he is trying to provoke is a paradigm shift in how we think of our relationship to animals. “One day we’ll be filing a suit on behalf of SeaWorld orcas,” Wise said, “these amazingly intelligent and social animals who were captured from the ocean and are now being kept in a tiny pool, and yet obviously it’s not illegal. SeaWorld is making tens of millions of dollars a year. No one is suggesting they be charged with cruelty to animals, and nobody has any ideas about how to get those orcas out. It’s the same thing with chimpanzees. So the reason we chose habeas corpus over other causes of action is that it’s the only possible remedy.”

Even some in the animal rights community have criticized Wise for the anthropocentrism of stressing his clients’ similarity to us rather than that basic Benthamic barometer of “can they suffer?” For Wise, though, “can they suffer?” is still the defining arbiter. It’s simply one that has been lent a whole new meaning and level of urgency by something obviously unavailable to a 19th-century British philosopher: the ever-growing body of scientific evidence pushing us into the increasingly discomfiting corner of knowing that, in the end, it isn’t really his clients’ likeness to us but their distinctly different and yet compellingly parallel complexity that now may command not just a philosophical regard but a legal one as well.

At just past 2 p.m. on Dec. 2, Nh.R.P.’s legal team of Wise, Prosin and Stein sat at the plaintiff’s table in the main courtroom of the Montgomery County courthouse in Fonda, N.Y., nervously awaiting the entrance of Justice Joseph M. Sise.

Wise had told me what he could expect from a decision made in a lower court like this one. “At this level,” he said, “it’s not going to be an emotional decision, but a very practical, serious one. The judge is going to want to rule in a way in which he feels reasonably supported by the existing laws. He doesn’t want to look like an idiot. But if he’s willing to hear the case, or even write a decision on it, as long as his rejection goes on the record, we can go to the Court of Appeals. That’s where you can argue with more emotion and where most common law gets made anyway.”

On the drive from Johnstown to the courthouse, Prosin was on her phone, trying to get information on Sise, a justice on the State Supreme Court. “Brother was a judge,” Prosin muttered. “Father a judge. He’s young. Graduated law school 1988. Conservative Republican.” There was, however, little clear indication of whether he might be a Lord Mansfield.

Now in the courtroom, a voice called, “All rise.” Through a sudden opening in the room’s oak paneling, Sise, a tall, lean, dark-haired man in his early 50s, emerged and strode swiftly to his seat at the bench. Wise listened, rapt as Sise spoke the words he had been waiting his entire career to hear in court: “This is in the matter of . . . an application . . . seeking a writ of habeas corpus for a nonhuman.”

When Sise asked Wise why Article 70 of the Civil Practice Law and Rules — New York State’s habeas corpus provision — “should be enlarged to include an animal, a chimpanzee,” the typically voluble Wise struggled to speak. You could almost hear the gears of his brain snagging, the various lines of argument that he had been planning and honing over the years for this very moment, getting all bound up now into one hopeless snarl.

“I couldn’t believe I was finally about to argue this case before a judge,” he told me later. “I really got choked up for a moment.”

The hearing took no more than 20 minutes. The justice interrupted often at the start, pre-empting Wise’s attempts at building an argument, knocking him back on his heels with repeated questions about why Article 70 was the only form of redress in this instance.

“Isn’t there a different way,” Sise asked at one point, “for you to petition the court for . . . relief other than attempting to have the Supreme Court . . . enlarge the definition of ‘human-being’ under Article 70 to include an animal?”

“We are most definitely not asking the court to redefine the term ‘human being,’ ” Wise boomed, his heart at last having loosened its grasp on his throat. “We brought a writ of habeas corpus because [it] is aimed at the denial of a legal person’s, not necessarily a human being’s, but a legal person’s right to bodily liberty.”

Wise next began to make his case for why all chimps in New York should be declared legal persons, arguing that they are fully autonomous beings. “Says who?” Sise asked. “And . . . I’m asking the question because that’s beyond your ken and beyond my ken. It’s beyond the ken of the normal fact-finder. You’re stating something that only expert testimony could supply.”

Wise quickly cited the affidavits from the world’s leading primatologists. The previously curt and pre-emptive Sise fell silent, leaning in, his head nodding slightly.

“So what is it that you’re asking the court to do in terms of Article 70, make an exception for chimpanzees only?” Sise asked. “You understand the question, right? The legal conundrum the court is in based upon your argument?”

“We are, in a specific, legal way . . . simply asking that you issue the writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Tommy,” Wise began calmly. “We are saying the reason that this court should do that is Tommy, as these experts pointed out, is autonomous. . . . Being a member of the species homosapiens is indeed a sufficient condition for personhood, but there are other sufficient conditions for personhood, as well. . . . Autonomy is an extraordinarily important attribute, and we argue . . . that a being who is autonomous, who can choose, who is self-aware, these, your honor, are essentially us.”

“All right,” Sise said. “What else? Anything else?”

Wise appeared spent. “No, your honor.”

The justice sat back in his chair. “Your impassioned representations to the court are quite impressive,” he said. “The court will not entertain the application, will not recognize a chimpanzee as a human or as a person . . . who can seek a writ of habeas corpus under Article 70. I will be available as the judge for any other lawsuit to right any wrongs that are done to this chimpanzee, because I understand what you’re saying. You make a very strong argument. However, I do not agree with the argument only insofar as Article 70 applies to chimpanzees. Good luck with your venture. I’m sorry I can’t sign the order, but I hope you continue. As an animal lover, I appreciate your work.”

I managed to get hold of Sise on the phone a few weeks later and asked him about his ruling. “I thought they should have an opportunity to make their argument as to why Article 70 should be enlarged to include nonhumans,” Sise said. “Ultimately, I felt that they had the right to make a record so that they could appeal. I thought, Here’s this group of lawyers, living and dying this, they deserve due process, and they deserve to be told just how impressed at least I was by the effort they’re making on behalf of animals.”

I said that I imagined it wasn’t the sort of case that came across his desk very often.

“Obviously not,” he said, laughing. “But in terms of the legal questions before the court, it was very similar to many applications we have: Whether or not a petition has been rightfully filed under an article and whether that article applies. So the legal analysis was not novel, although the facts certainly were.”

The Nh.R.P. ended up losing their other two New York cases as well, with the judges arguing that the petitioners had other remedies they could seek through existing animal-protection laws. But before Justice Ralph A. Boniello III, of the State Supreme Court for the County of Niagara, rendered his decision, Wise was given full leave to air for the record his petition on behalf of Kiko. The justice called the argument “excellent” but concluded that he was “not prepared to make this leap of faith.”

On balance, Wise and his colleagues emerged from their first round of suits ecstatic. They had all they needed to take the cases to the appellate level to keep making their argument.

In February, the Nh.R.P. lawyers were in New York City for a weekend-long meeting to refine their pending appeals for later this year and to decide on the next roster of plaintiffs. In a couple of weeks Wise would be back on the road, reviewing new prospects: mostly chimps and a few circus elephants. For the latter, Wise told me, the California-based animal-protection organization PAWS is willing to provide sanctuary on a case-by-case basis.

Over dinner one night, I asked Wise about the oft-stated position that there are already ample forms of redress for the likes of Tommy. Did he ever feel that gaining legal rights for such creatures is really a symbolic gesture? As Richard Epstein put it in his N.Y.U. office, “He’s just sticking his fingers in your eyes.”

“In whose eyes?” Wise said, smiling. “In the world’s eye? For what purpose? Look, he’s a law professor. He doesn’t practice law. If he does, it isn’t this kind of law. It’s hardly symbolic for the animals.”

I reminded Wise at one point that he, the crusader against speciesism and ordained hierarchies, has been accused of erecting a speciesist hierarchy of his own by singling out only certain sufficiently sophisticated animals to represent in court. I asked him, for example, if he would also consider filing a suit on behalf of a captive vervet monkey or a tortoise or a rat.

“I don’t know the answer to the question,” he responded. “The reason I do know the answer for the animals we are currently choosing to represent is we’ve spent years trying to understand what their cognitive capabilities are. But we feel very comfortable in saying that for any nonhuman animal who is autonomous, whatever species they may be, then we will go into court and make the argument that they have a sufficient condition for rights. We’ve never claimed it’s a necessary condition, and as the public debate evolves, people may be making other arguments based on other factors. I mean, how autonomous do you have to be anyway? Look at human beings. We all have rights, and we range from drooling, nonautonomous people to people who are extraordinarily autonomous, like Richard Epstein.”

Wise told me he was well aware of the fact that for creatures like Tommy, a victory in court could only result in transfer to a kinder type of captivity. The larger significance of winning for Wise, however, is the clear message it sends about the wrongfulness of holding captive a chimp or a circus elephant or a SeaWorld orca in the first place.

In a 2001 debate with Peter Singer, Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit — who has debated Wise as well — argued that only facts will lead to according animals rights, not intuitions. “Much is lost,” Posner stated at one point, “when . . . intuition is made a stage in a logical argument.”

And yet in that same debate, Posner stated that the special status we humans accord ourselves is based not on tests or statistics but on “a moral intuition deeper than any reason that could be given for it and impervious to any reason that you or anyone could give against it.” That inherent irrationality at the heart of humanity’s sense of exceptionalism is what most worries Wise.

“It’s those deeply held beliefs that I’m concerned about,” he told me. “The judge who either doesn’t recognize that he’s ruling against us on those grounds, or who does, and decides that way anyway. Our challenge is to lay bare that bias against our facts. I will say: ‘Judge, you know, we’ve been here before. We’ve had people who’ve essentially said, “I’m sorry, but you’re black.” Or “I’m sorry, you’re not a male or a heterosexual.” And this has led us to some very bad places.’ ”

Much like other civil rights movements, the Nh.R.P.’s efforts are designed to be a systematic assault; a continued and repeated airing of the evidence now at hand so that other lawyers and eventually judges and society as a whole can move past what Wise considers the increasingly arbitrary distinction of species as the determinant of who should hold a right.

Wise said he doesn’t expect to win in the first round of suits, and neither does he in the fifth or the 20th. “For me this has been a 25-year plan. All my books and my courses were designed to help me think through this problem. Now I want to spend the rest of my life litigating. If we lose, we keep doing it again and again, until we find a judge who doesn’t feel that the way is closed off. Then our job is to produce the facts that will allow that judge to make that leap of faith. And when it happens, it will be huge. I wouldn’t be spending my life on this otherwise.”

Patrice Greanville

—DISCLAIMER—

•

The Sochi Winter Olympics opening today may still come out alright, as its ambitious creators intended—the infrastructure holds; no ugly, embarrassing terrorist attack occurs (genuine or false flag); and the public around the world gets to see a revitalized Russia hosting a major global event with dignity and aplomb.  Problem is, just like prior events of this kind organized in other lands, and presently being prepared elsewhere (Brazil), a heavy undercurrent of criticism, some of it, granted, routine Russia-bashing propaganda,  and some of it perfectly valid, is putting a tarnish on what should have been a remarkably uncontested show of Russian capabilities.

•

Let’s begin with the two most obvious mistakes.

•

Sochi should have never been chosen for the Winter Olympics. The location is questionable. Sochi is a well-known spa for the Russian, a refuge from the harsh climes their nation is famous for. As some have already pointed out, putting the olympic games there is like staging a Winter Olympics in the US in Florida. Sochi is in fact the warmest spot ever to be chosen for a Winter Olympics. This means a perverse defiance of mother nature, stupid thing in itself (unless it was deliberate policy to enrich cronies close to Putin, more on that below) especially when we consider how many gelid spots that great country has.

•
The grand designs for Sochi have meant a huge logistical nightmare for the contractors, who have been compelled to build a large number of supporting and essential structures from scratch (Sochi is supposed to be Russia’s new permanent winter games training ground), from hotels and accommodations up to world standards to the olympic facilities, all in a comparative record time, a program enveloped from the start in accusations of shameless cronyism and runaway corruption. Again, this should be taken with a huge lump of salt. Putin’s government has many enemies, and as far as fleecing the public treasury who can compete with our own Pentagon contractors and their concubine politicians? No greater pimps the world has ever seen. So let’s keep ourselves on an even keel as we examine these issues, including gross incompetence. Here’s a typical  Western report by USA Today:

Sochi Olympics ‘used to enrich Putin’s friends’

Thomas Grove, Moscow correspondent for The Scotsman, did an extensive interview with Putin’s nemesis, Alexei Navalny (left), himself a highly controversial dissident and ultra Russian nationalist, on the matter of Sochi-related corruption. Navalny’s accusations are not surprisingly in sync with those we find on many Western media.  CBS, for example, has been prominent in this regard. But before weighing his testimony on the topic at hand, it’s worth noting that a lot is lost “in translation,” which in this case goes way beyond mere literal meanings. Russia’s politics are muscular, with the players often fiercely outspoken, a culture where mealy-mouthed Western “PC” thankfully does not yet operate. People tend to speak their minds freely, the devil take the hindmost, and while the sordid wiles of marketing and public relations have begun to make inroads and “blandify” the language, and even “spin masters” are starting to crop up, candor is still very much the norm.  That said, since Navalny’s claims are so explosive, it’s somewhat remarkable that the BBC, while recognizing the usefulness of a fearless dissident capable of embarrassing the Kremlin, has also brought Navalny’s ultra-nationalism into question, chiefly for his endorsement of a political campaign called “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” and his willingness to speak at ultra-nationalist events. 

Navalny once compared dark-skinned Caucasus militants with cockroaches. Cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he said, but as for humans, “I recommend a pistol.”^[85][86] Navalny’s defenders suggested the comment was simply a joke. (Wikipedia on Navalny). Well, here’s part of the interview:

Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny has released a detailed interactive map that paints a vivid picture of corruption, cost overruns and conflicts of interest at the Sochi Winter Olympics.

The report, culling information from government budgets and data from companies involved in construction for the Games, is the latest to pour scorn on a project on which president Vladimir Putin has staked his personal and political prestige.

Mr Navalny, who led protests against Mr Putin in Moscow two years ago, said the information challenged the president’s figure for spending on the Sochi Games, which open in the Black Sea resort on 7 February.

“Russia’s overall expenses have already reached $50 billion (£30bn), which makes the Russian Olympics five times more expensive than the Vancouver [Winter] Olympics [in 2010,” the report said. “Officials and businessmen also took part in the Games and turned them into a source of income.”

The report said Mr Putin had helped enrich friends by awarding them contracts to build large-scale Olympic venues at a cost several times above those of similar venues elsewhere.

Mr Putin has dismissed claims of corruption and challenged those who made allegations to back up their claims.

In an interview earlier this month, he said: “We don’t see any large-scale instances of corruption during our preparations … in Sochi. If anyone has any information about corruption in Sochi, please hand it over, we will be glad and grateful.”

The president’s figure for total spending on the Games has diverged from those provided in other estimates, including one of $50bn from another Russian opposition figure, who accused contractors of stealing half the money allocated for the Winter Olympics.

Earlier this month, Mr Putin said Russia had spent only about $6.5bn on preparations for the Games, in sharp contrast with an estimate from deputy prime minister Dmitry Kozak, who last year said Russia would spend some $50bn.

Mr Navalny’s report said more than $12bn in state funds had been divided between two companies, Olimpstroy and state monopoly Russian Railroads, to build venues and roads. It said $8.7bn had been spent to build a railway and motorway nearly 50km long that leads to the Rosa Khutor ski resort, the venue of the Olympic mountain sports.

Part of that, Mr Navalny said, went to friends of the president.

His report, which won little attention in Russia’s tightly controlled media,* also contradicted government statements that private companies’ money had made up for more than half of the investment in Sochi. It said private companies had put less than 4 per cent of the cost.

“In their statements, officials referred to investments of Gazprom, Sberbank, Russian Railways and other government-affiliated entities as private investments,” the report said, adding that under international accounting standards, such investments would be considered state money.

Subcontractors say that corruption has been endemic in the lead up to the Sochi Games. (Source: The Scotsman.)
* Please disregard the gratuitous bull about the “Russia’s tightly controlled media,” as if Western corporate media was really free from bias or systemic fealty.

Rulership in most nations but no real just or imaginative or compassionate leadership anywhere

I’ve observed before that much of the deplorable condition of the world is owed to the fact the masses are not properly led, neither by the standards of a Platonic “philosopher king,” nor —the Devil forbid—by a true “democracy,” however lacking in moral virtue. Our current phase closely resembles what the old sage envisioned as a global oligarchy, albeit one already marked with modern forms of tyranny. In this context, with the superpowers in the grip of the most degenerate forms of pseudo-democratic rulership, leadership of any acceptable kind is hard to find, and problems that should be easy to solve considering the massive resources at the service of the modern nation state, become festering wounds in the body politic.

This global paradox that now threatens to terminate our own planetary viability is aggravated by the seamless integration of the sociopolitical system in command —what brainy types call the prevailing paradigm—with its natural type of governance, in our era global capitalism with pseudo-democracy or outright fascism, as its overt political manifestations. By now, most of those who have not spent their lives sleeping under a rock should be familiar with the beast. This is the system in which, amid unmeasurable wealth in the hands of an obscenely tiny minority, there are people everywhere fighting for economic security or stuck in poverty (I’m speaking about capitalism in both its core and periphery).

This is a system where desperately urgent issues like global warming and massive species die-offs due to human activity meet with pallid responses and empty rhetoric, where unemployment proves intractable due to the sick (by design) social relations of the antinomic classes which enforce profoundly uneven income distributions, and where a failure of the administrative imagination is both scandalous and pandemic. Yea, this is a system, a political culture, where idiocies like the bankruptcy of a whole city like Detroit is contemplated with sheepish acceptance, as if ordained by God instead of manmade rules.

And now, suffer the dogs

•

•

The sins of Sochi —such as they are—have been detailed above, but now another terrible miscalculation threatens to put a different kind of stain on the project: the opportunistic “culling” of stray dogs by the municipal authorities.In this perhaps we witness yet again two very old and ugly partners at work: governmental bureaucratic incompetence, with its attendant lack of imagination and initiative, and a lack of institutional compassion, which should be a requisite for any instrument of civilized governance.

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The wiping out of strays in the Sochi region is simply unwarranted.  For if a great nation like Russia is able to pour billions of dollars to create an artificial oasis for the winter games, it is damned well capable of building a few shelters where the animals can be placed until adoption or another way of humanely deciding their fate can be arranged. Sochi’s treatment of its most vulnerable creatures should have been a showcase of a new Russia measuring up to its best instincts. Unfortunately, this has not happened, and things on the ground are a bit more complex than just a question of choosing between black hats and white hats, for, frankly, if there is evil in the actions of the winter games organizers, it is more evil by dint of banality than active intent. Like the pervasive speciesism —a type of moral blindness—that permeates so much human thinking about animals around the globe, and the obtuseness that characterizes mediocre or nonexistent leadership at all levels, the unnecessary poisoning of Sochi’s homeless dogs is yet another avoidable tragedy that should have been avoided.  Their fate has been sealed by the mountain of complications, disorder, and social imperfections that still dominate every human culture. Good leadership could start to clean this up, but for that I’m afraid we’ll need a revolution.

•••

Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post’s founding editor. In 1982 he founded Cyrano’s Journal, the first radical media review in the United States.

•

APPENDIX I

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a rather illuminating piece on this topic, focusing on the many shoes of gray that accompany human action. I quote at some length:

Racing to Save the Stray Dogs of Sochi

SOCHI, Russia — A dog shelter backed by a Russian billionaire is engaged in a frantic last-ditch effort to save hundreds of strays facing a death sentence before the Winter Olympics begin here.

Already, hundreds of animals have been killed, with the local authorities apparently wanting the stray dogs cleared from the streets before Friday’s opening ceremony.

While the authorities say the dogs can be wild and dangerous, reports of their systematic slaughter by a pest removal company hired by the government in recent months have outraged animal rights advocates and cast a gruesome specter over the traditionally cheery atmosphere of the Games.

The handling of the matter has also sharply undercut the image of a friendlier, welcoming Russia that President Vladimir V. Putin has sought to cultivate in recent months. 

“We were told, ‘Either you take all the dogs from the Olympic Village or we will shoot them,’ ” said Olga Melnikova, who is coordinating the rescue effort on behalf of a charity called Volnoe Delo (roughly, Good Will), which is financed by Oleg V. Deripaska, one of Russia’s billionaire oligarchs.

Dogs outside a snowboarding course in Sochi. Many of the strays are abandoned pets. Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

“On Monday we were told we have until Thursday,” Ms. Melnikova said.

A “dog rescue” golf cart is now scouring the Olympic campus, picking up the animals and delivering them to the shelter, which is really an outdoor shantytown of doghouses on a hill on the outskirts of the city. It is being called PovoDog, a play on the Russian word povodok, which means leash.

Lying past a cemetery, at the end of a dirt road and without electricity or running water, the makeshift PovoDog shelter is already giving refuge to about 80 animals, including about a dozen puppies. One is a chocolate-colored Shar-Pei and her two mostly Shar-Pei puppies. Another is a large, reddish-brown sheep dog named Kasthan, who likes to jump up and kiss the shelter workers, who are mostly volunteers.

Local animal rights workers say many of the strays were pets, or the offspring of pets, abandoned by families whose homes with yards were demolished over the past few years to make way for the Olympic venues and who were compensated with new apartments in taller buildings, where keeping a pet is often viewed as undesirable.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE

Below, CBS News report on the poisoning of strays. Click on Page 2.

CBS NEWS
February 6, 2014, 7:53 AM

Sochi dog lovers scramble to save strays from poison as they’re culled in Olympic host city

City-contracted dog catchers are racing to kill stray dogs like this one before the Sochi Winter Olympics begin. CBS

SOCHI, Russia — It is difficult for Sochi resident Tatiana Zarutsjaya to talk about the Winter Olympics host city’s dog culling program without bursting into tears.

“In order to keep those street dogs alive, I’d rather take them into my home than let them be killed,” she says, her eyes welling up. “I’ve brought 17 stray puppies into my house. I really feel like I am taking care of real children.”

Dog lovers like Zarutsjaya are outraged at the government’s move to contract a pest control company to kill hundreds of stray dogs in the Olympic host city. Dog catchers argue the stray canines are too dangerous to roam Sochi’s streets during the Winter Games.

Alexei Sorokin, the Managing Director of the firm culling the dogs said the street dogs have bitten people, and we did see a stray dog nipping at a woman’s hand on a main road to the Olympic Village on Wednesday.

Sorokin insists the dogs are poisoned humanely.

 Sochi has actually had a dog cull program in effect for years, but animal rights activists say it is time for change. “Sochi officials should be trying a different approach — not just killing these dogs, but perhaps sterilizing them, or use a program that’s more updated and modern,” animal rights activist Ekaterina Gontareva told CBS News.

Gontareva has been spending her own money taking in strays in her outdoor shelter in the outskirts of Sochi. She points to another row of dozens of wire cages and doghouses nearby, saying a local businessman opened the shelter to save canines from the poison.

“We put pictures of the dogs on the internet, and hope someone will come forward to take them,” the former head of Sochi’s Animal Protection Center said.

For dog catcher Sorokin, it’s about more than public safety. If a dog walked onto the stage during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, he said “it would be a disgrace for the whole country.” That’s not good enough an excuse for Zarutsjaya.

“I hate [Sorokin],” she told CBS News bluntly. “I believe that God will punish him for this.”

Filed by correspondent Alphonso Van Marsh, based in the CBS News London Bureau (on Twitter: @AlphonsoVM)

By Ruth Eisenbud, Animal Issues Correspondent
Annotated by Patrice Greanville

This is a follow up to LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND HEARTLESS [https://www.greanvillepost.com/2014/02/02/lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-heartless/]

Thomas Babington Macaulay, a coldblooded imperialist.

Why is it that almost all the photo ops of hunters gloating over their prey are white Christian males, and more recently, women of the same demographic? The canned hunt of a rare black rhino in namibia was auctioned off by a hunting association in Texas, heavily infused by a christian perspective, to an inheritor of dominion for $350,000. The glory of dominion comes with a hefty price tag, but then man’s dominion over the animals carries with it the imperative of triumph over nature and animalkind.

“The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.’” —Genesis

Hunters —and in general sociopaths—scoff at images like this. They see neither the message nor its sheer beauty.

The magnates of Indian corporations and government officials go out of their way to proclaim they are vegetarian from birth, as this comes with a certain amount of status… There are no photo ops of the rich and famous among these ranks posed triumphantly over animal corpses.

Although Indian princes had long practiced “recreational hunting of tigers and other animals, the floodgates were open with the arrival of European conquerors, chiefly the British. It was precisely British imperialist Lord Macaulay who brought the  notion of the”Great White Hunter to India (as they did to Africa):

Lord Macaulay

An Indian movie star, Salman Khan (see below), from the semitic religion of Islam, was arrested for deer hunting in Rajistan:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/23/salman-khan-deer-killing_n_2939720.html

Another moral imbecile displaying his “prowess”.

Though he offered bribes to poor villagers, they refused to cooperate and reported him to Wildlife Services. In Christian nations wildlife services takes bribes in the form of fees, as it functions to aid and abet in every step of the hunting process from licensing to implementation.No one in dominion nations is arrested for hunting. In fact there are canned hunts of exotic animals, pigeon shoots, python slaughterfests, wolf derbies, squirrel slams and culls of every animal. The latest declared culls, being the effort to kill all the mute swans of New York City along with the destruction of 3000 deer in eastern Long Island.
 
Though Lord Macaulay brought the Great White Hunter to India, with the scheme to invalidate Indian values, with liberation from its dominion masters all the excesses of hunting have now been banned by The Wildermess Protection Act of India. India has had the good sense to return to its traditionally more compassionate view of animals, based on the wisdom of ahimsa: reverence for ALL life:

"For there is nothing inaccessible for death.
All beings are fond of life, hate pain, like pleasure,
shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life
is dear." Jain Acharanga Sutra.

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Salman Khan Deer Killing: Bollywood Actor And Others Charged WIth Killing Rare Species

Ironic that for uber-egotistical celebrity Salman Khan being human does not include having any compassion.

Bollywood film actor Salman Khan smiles during the launch of his ‘Being Human’ flagship clothing store in Mumbai on January 17, 2013.

An Indian court will try five Bollywood actors, including action hero Salman Khan, for allegedly killing two rare deer in a western India wildlife preserve 14 years ago.

Attorney K.L. Vyas says that while Salman Khan was charged with shooting the bucks, Saif Ali Khan, Sonali Bendre and others allegedly abetted the crime by encouraging him while hunting in Rajasthan state.

The Indian court system is notoriously slow, and it often takes years and even decades for a case to go to trial.

••••

If convicted, the actors could face three to six years in prison. They deny the charges.
Four of the accused appeared before a magistrate Saturday.

On Thursday, Sanjay Dutt had a conviction for illegal possession of weapons upheld, and the Bollywood leading man now faces prison time.