As we continue to grieve the passing of our founder Steven Wise, we wanted to thank our supporters for the huge outpouring of support over the last week and a half. We've read and deeply appreciated every message, each one a moving reaffirmation of what made Steve such an extraordinary thinker, lawyer, and person. The global animal rights movement has truly been alight with thoughts of Steve and all he inspired, and we at the NhRP are all the more committed and ready to continue what Steve started.
You can read about Steve's life and impact in this in-depth story in The Washington Post, this one in The New York Times, and this one in Steve's local paper The Sun Sentinel. NhRP board member Dr. Jane Goodall, law professor Joyce Tischler, nonfiction writer Brandon Keim, and journalist Rich Barlow are among those who wrote reflections on their friendship with and admiration for Steve. Steve's memorial page contains hundreds of remembrances, not just from friends, colleagues, former students, NhRP supporters, and activists, but also from surprising voices, like the Argentine judges who helped free Sandra the orangutan in 2019 and Justice Barbara Jaffe, before whom Steve argued for our chimpanzee clients' right to liberty in 2015. You can read these remembrances here.
Steve was unshaking in his belief in and commitment to nonhuman animal rights. So are we. Thank you again for joining us in honoring Steve. In the weeks, months, and years ahead, we look forward to fighting tirelessly for our clients and illuminating the injustice of nonhuman animals' rightlessness, just as he did.
“For four thousand years, a thick and impenetrable legal wall has separated all human from all nonhuman animals. On one side, even the most trivial interests of a single species—ours—are jealously guarded. We have assigned ourselves, alone among the million animal species, the status of 'legal persons.' On the other side of that wall lies the legal refuse of an entire kingdom, not just chimpanzees and bonobos but also gorillas, orangutans, and monkeys, dogs, elephants, and dolphins. They are treated as 'legal things.' Their most basic and fundamental interests—their pains, their lives, their freedoms—are intentionally ignored, often maliciously trampled, and routinely abused. Ancient philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and placed on this earth just for human beings. Ancient jurists declared that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy and science have long since recanted, the law has not.” – Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage (2000)
