In Memorium

The animal kingdom has lost two visionary advocates — Steven M. Wise and Frans de Waal — whose respective work in the fields of law and zoology advanced our understanding of both the idea of nonhuman personhood and the complex inner lives of animals.

De Waal, a Dutch-American behavioral biologist and primatologist, was one of the world’s foremost experts on animal intelligence. The former director of the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution at Emory University spent a lifetime researching the social, cultural, and inner lives of chimpanzees and other species. His work with animals showed evidence of empathy, morality, and sentient awareness — traits long assumed to be exclusively human.

His research has been published in hundreds of peer-reviewed journals, and his best-selling books — including Chimpanzee Politics (1982), The Bonobo and the Atheist (2013), and Mama’s Last Hug (2019) — used compelling storytelling and humor to put forth thought-provoking ideas that challenged existing beliefs about what it means to be an animal and a human being.

De Waal, who was named one of the 47 all-time “Great Minds of Science” by Discover in 2011, showed us that we are not so different from our nonhuman neighbors. In fact, he went so far as to say that we should stop stressing the specific point when we moved from ape to human. “That there was ever such a point in time is a widespread illusion,” he wrote in Mama’s Last Hug, “like trying to find the precise wavelength in the light spectrum at which orange turns into red.”

In 2014, de Waal summed up his career thus: “I’ve brought apes a little closer to humans, but I’ve also brought humans down a bit.” He passed away in March at his home in Atlanta, Georgia, after a brief battle with cancer. He was 75.

Steve Wise, a contemporary of de Waal, was a pioneering animal rights lawyer who argued that primates and other highly intelligent animals, such as dolphins, whales, and elephants, should have the same fundamental right to liberty as humans.

Originally a criminal and personal injury lawyer, Wise had an epiphany in 1980 after reading Animal Liberation, Peter Singer’s groundbreaking 1975 treatise. He switched tracks, joining the nonprofit that would become the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which litigates for the humane treatment of animals. In 2007 he founded the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), the “only civil rights organization in the United States dedicated solely to securing personhood rights for nonhuman animals.”

Recognition as legal persons, Wise believed, would protect these animals from being held captive by private citizens, or in zoos, circuses, and theme parks, and protect them from invasive experiments in laboratories.

In 2013, NhRP filed the first-ever lawsuits of a kind in the world demanding that four captive chimpanzees in New York State — Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo — be recognized as “persons.” NhRP has since filed similar cases for several other captive animals. None of these initial cases have won so far, but Wise never expected them to. He worked on the premise that it could take decades, probably beyond his lifetime, for that to happen.

“For hundreds and hundreds of years, there has been a legal wall that separates all nonhuman animals from human beings,” Wise told the Journal in 2014. “What we are trying to do is change the entire legal conversation and really punch a hole through that wall.”

Also a victim of cancer, Wise kept working for his nonhuman clients through three brain surgeries and two rounds of chemotherapy. He died in February at his home in Coral Springs, Florida. He was 73.