Tommy the chimpanzee got his day in court on 8 October 2014. He was unable to attend the hearing in \u2018person\u2019 \u2013 spending the day, like any other, in a cage at a used trailer sales lot in Gloversville, New York. But an hour\u2019s drive away, in a courtroom in the state capital of Albany, Steven Wise of the Nonhuman Rights Project argued that Tommy should indeed be considered a person under New York state law. If so, Patrick and Diane Lavery of Circle L Trailer Sales could be summoned to determine whether they are imprisoning him illegally.<\/p>\n
Central to Wise\u2019s arguments in Tommy\u2019s case, and similar suits his organisation has filed on behalf of other captive chimpanzees, is the assertion that apes are highly intelligent and self-aware beings with complex emotional lives. \u201cThe uncontroverted facts demonstrate that chimpanzees possess the autonomy and self-determination that are supreme common law values,\u201d Wise told the five judges hearing the case.<\/p>\n
It is a bold legal move \u2013 and so far unsuccessful. The court in Albany, like a lower court before it, rejected the idea that Tommy has legal rights of personhood. But Wise intends to fight on, taking Tommy\u2019s case to the state\u2019s ultimate arbiter, the New York Court of Appeals.<\/p>\n
Events elsewhere in New York State stand in stark contrast to its courts\u2019 willingness to consider the legal implications of the science of animal cognition. In March 2014, the Rip Van Winkle Rod and Gun Club in Palenville, a hamlet of some 1,000 people on the Hudson River, held the fourth instalment of an annual festival that makes a competitive sport out of shooting down creatures that \u2013 judged by objective measures of their mental abilities \u2013 are arguably just as deserving of personhood as Tommy.<\/p>\n
Those creatures are crows, targeted with abandon at the Palenville \u2018Crow Down\u2019. In recent years, members of the corvid family \u2013 including crows, ravens, jays and magpies \u2013 have been found to possess cognitive skills once thought to be the exclusive domain of people and the great apes. They make and use tools. They remember details about the past and plan for the future. They even seem to respond to one another\u2019s knowledge and desires. \u201cFor all the studies that have been compared directly so far, the corvids seem to perform as well as the chimpanzees,\u201d says Nicky Clayton of the University of Cambridge, in whose lab some of the most exciting discoveries have been made.<\/p>\n