Nonhuman Rights Project founder & author Steven Wise dies at age 73

Steven M. Wise. (Beth Clifton collage)

Hero to many animal advocates, and scoundrel to many, too

Steven M. Wise, 73, an author and former attorney regarded by many animal advocates as an “innovative scholar and groundbreaking expert on animal law,” and by many others as an arch-scoundrel, died on February 15, 2024, in Coral Springs, Florida, his home for about a decade, “after a long illness,” said a statement from the Nonhuman Rights Project, an organization that Wise himself founded and headed.

Involved in opposition to the Vietnam War as an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Wise “graduated from Boston University Law School in 1976 and began his legal career as a criminal defense lawyer,” the Nonhuman Rights Project statement said.

Inspired by Peter Singer

“Several years later, Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation inspired Wise to become an animal protection lawyer,” the Nonhuman Rights Project statement continued.

“By 1980, Wise started visiting slaughterhouses and biomedical labs. He became a vegetarian, stopped wearing leather. He redirected his Boston law practice from personal injury to animal rights, and since has been joined by his law partner and [first] wife, Debra Slater-Wise,” a 2002 Tampa Bay Times profile recounted.

“From 1984 to 1994, he served as president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund,” also teaching animal rights law at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont, beginning in 1990.

During this same time frame, however, Wise represented clients including the Primarily Primates sanctuary near San Antonio, Texas; the Connecticut-based national animal advocacy organization Friends of Animals, for which Primarily Primates became a subsidiary in 2007; and Citizens to End Animal Suffering & Exploitation, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Each of these attorney/client relationships ended in acrimony, including allegations that Wise had run up exorbitant bills pursuing dubious legal theories that ultimately went nowhere.

Wally Swett. (Facebook photo)

Primarily Primates

Primarily Primates hired Wise in 1992 to respond to allegations of alleged mismanagement raised by ex-staff and volunteers. Wise then billed Primarily Primates for “more than $40,000 above his written estimate,” Primarily Primates president Wally Swett testified, and “orchestrated what the Texas attorney general’s office referred to as a corporate overthrow attempt for my refusal to pay his bill without an audit.”

Wrote Boston Herald legal columnist Maggie Mulvihill, “Documents filed with the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts show Wise tried to convince two Primarily Primates trustees to try to wrest control of the organization from Swett.”

Wise also contacted financial institutions where Primarily Primates held accounts, requesting that they be frozen, “and contacted the Texas attorney general’s office to accuse Primarily Primates of mismanaging funds,” Mulvihill continued.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Suspended

The actions by Wise temporarily cost Primarily Primates financial aid from several major animal rights organizations which had supported the care of various nonhuman primates whom Primarily Primates housed on the organizations’ behalf.

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts on December 19, 2000 suspended Wise from legal practice for six months and ordered him to pass an examination on professional responsibility as a condition of readmission to the bar.

The suspension began on January 19, 2001 and was lifted nine and a half months later, on October 1, 2021.

Tennessee Rottweiler and black Dutch shepherd dog attack.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Dangerous dogs disappeared

Instead, with Wise in the background and taking credit in the 2002 Tampa Bay Times profile for “defending nearly 150 dangerous dogs on death row,” Debra Slater-Wise developed a practice focused on representing dog owners whose pit bulls, Rottweilers, a repeat offending Labrador retriever, and in at least one case a German shepherd had mauled people.

Observed Worcester Telegram & Gazette columnist Dianne Williamson on June 30, 2002, “Chewy, tragically, was hit by a car. Kodiak and Madison disappeared to New Hampshire. Cody and Reba, oddly enough, were apparently snatched by dognappers.

“According to their owners, such fates befell each of these death row dogs’ shortly before they were scheduled to be killed after vicious attacks on humans. But their timely vanishing act isn’t the only thing linking the dogs,” Williamson wrote.

Montgomery County dog warden Mark Kumpf with pit bull advocate Jane Berkey, who helped Kumpf to undo the Ohio law recognizing pit bulls as inherently “vicious.”

Pit-pushing

“Each of their owners had retained legal beagle Debra Slater-Wise of Boston, whose pet cause is sparing canine criminals from execution.”

Slater-Wise denied any knowledge or involvement in the dogs’ disappearances, but continued to represent Jason Schiller, owner of two vanished Rottweilers, who had mauled a three-year-old boy in 2001, until they were finally found and euthanized in Aprl 2004.

Steven Wise himself, meanwhile, started the Nonhuman Rights Project in 1995, of which Jane Berkey, founder of the pit bull advocacy organization Animal Farm Foundation, is a longtime board member.

Steven Wise circa 1995. (Facebook photo)

Writing & teaching

Wise then embarked on a long career of writing and, as the Nonhuman Rights Project announcement of his death put it, “teaching animal rights jurisprudence at law schools around the world, including Stanford Law School, the University of Miami Law School, St. Thomas University Law School, John Marshall Law School, Lewis & Clark Law School, Vermont Law School, Tel Aviv University, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.”

Steven Wise produced four books: Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (2000); Drawing the Line: Science & the Case for Animal Rights (2002); Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (2005); and An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominion Along the Banks of the Cape Fear River (2009).

Steven and Gail Price Wise.
(Facebook photo)

Argued parallels between case for animal rights & against abortion

In the first of those books, Rattling the Cage, Wise argued that establishing legal rights for animals can occur, eventually, with only small departures from previous rulings issued on behalf of humans, particularly the unborn and the mentally impaired.

From a legal perspective, Wise contended, the animal rights and anti-abortion struggles closely parallel. This made him the first recognized leader in either the animal rights or anti-abortion camp to imply on the record that the two causes may have more in common than not.

All of this, though much discussed and admired in academia, led to nothing of actual precedent-setting legal importance.

Shubhobroto Ghosh, India wildlife projects manager, World Animal Protect, with Steven Wise in 2018. (Facebook photo)

In fact, the Nonhuman Rights Project, though nominally begun to seek legal rights for animals in courtrooms and raising more than $1.5 million a year in recent years, paying Steven Wise more than $200,000 a year, did not even file a case until 2013.

Wise meanwhile split with Debra Slater-Wise, losing a lawsuit to her and unsuccessfully appealing it in 2012, and remarrying to Gail Price-Wise.

Lost in Manhattan

The Appellate Division Court of Manhattan on June 8, 2017 ruled 5-0 against a Wise lawsuit that sought to have chimpanzees recognized as legal persons, with constitutionally protected human rights including the right to liberty.

In 2022 a Nonhuman Rights Project case briefly won a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Happy, a Bronx Zoo elephant housed alone, but the New York Court of Appeals quickly reversed the lower court ruling.

Taken together, those decisions signal rejection by two of the most influential courts in the U.S. of attempts to change the legal status of animals by seeking to have novel legal theories recognized as precedents, as opposed to changing the underlying legislation through the political process.

Beth & Merritt Clifton

Some “personhood” cases have had limited success in Latin America, but in very different legal systems, using languages in which all entities, living or not, are identified by either male or female pronouns, thereby blurring the distinction between humans, other animals, and even inanimate objects.

(See Lost in translation: “personhood” verdict reportedly won for elephant.)

The Latin American cases therefore literally do not translate into precedents applicable in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of jurisprudence.