Over a cup of coffee and a bottle of Al-Ain water, in a spacious conference room far too big for a company of two, I introduced myself to Steven Wise, the American legal scholar who specializes in animal protection and animal intelligence. The story of his career began in 1980 when, as a law school graduate with a passion for social justice, he read a book that would change the course of his career.

“Back when I was a lot younger than I am now,” the 65 year-old lawyer chuckled, “I read a book by the philosopher Peter Singer about animal liberation. … I read in the book that nonhuman animals were being harmed in vast numbers of terrible ways, and there did not seem to be any lawyers who were standing up for their interests. And I decided that I could have the most beneficial effect by being one who did.”

As Wise forayed into the unknown territory of nonhuman animal rights, he started work at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, where he realized that it was difficult to protect even the most fundamental rights of nonhuman animals. The problem? Nonhuman animals were considered to be things.

“I realised that just litigating cases in the courts was not going to help them a lot. If I did that, the problem was that as things they lacked capacity for any sort of legal rights that would protect even their most fundamental interests, so I began to work on a long-term campaign, that would lead to them, I hoped, beginning to be viewed as persons.”

After five years with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Wise estimated that it would take him about 30 years of work to get to the point where he would be able to file a lawsuit with some chance of succeeding. Over that time, he has researched law and studied deeply the origin of rights: where they came from, who had them, who didn’t have them and how those who didn’t have them got them. He wrote several law review articles, and began to write books and teach animal rights law in law schools. In 1995, he founded the Nonhuman Rights Project.

“It really didn’t do much — it was essentially me, you know, for the next 12 years until 2007, and then it really started going at that time. It had been 22 years, reading and lecturing and writing, and I was ready to now start litigating the ideas that I had been developing. So that’s when the Nonhuman Rights Project really began to move into much higher gear — higher and higher and higher gear.”

The organization has certainly soared since its inception — the Annual Charity Evaluators declared the Nonhuman Rights Project as one of their standout charities of 2015 and 2016. The purpose of the Nonhuman Rights Project is simple: to have nonhuman animals go from being things to being persons, and then litigating about which right would be appropriate for that specific animal.

“Right now, all nonhuman animals are things and all humans are persons. But 200 years ago, that wasn’t true. There were many humans who were also things — sometimes slaves, sometimes women. So over the last two centuries there’s been some holes punched in the wall and all the humans have been brought over from the things side to the person side. And so, I view this law as being permeable. It tends to hold persons and things apart but you can move. And so now we’re saying the next entities who should move from being a thing to a person are not humans, but they are the most cognitively complex nonhuman animals. It’s now their turn. So what the Nonhuman Rights Project is trying to do, is to break through that wall and begin that process.”

The goal was clear to me, but the aftermath of achieving the goal seemed complicated. If a nonhuman animal was now a person and had rights, didn’t it also have responsibilities? Wise smiled and took a sip of his coffee. He has answered this question many, many times.

“Some of the judges that I go in front of are very confused about this. They ask the same question, and for a lawyer, it should be a very easy answer.” he said. “There are many ways of describing rights. The [way] that [is] used most often in the Anglo-American law [was] developed by a professor at Yale named Wesley Hohfeld in 1916. And he talked about there being four kinds of different rights, with each of the rights correlating with something else.”

The four rights, as theorized by Hohfeld, are classified into liberty, claim, power and immunity rights. Wise works to obtain immunity rights for nonhuman animals, and explained that there is a particularly big difference between immunity and claim rights.

“A claim right correlates with a duty or a responsibility. So a classic claim right case might be if you and I signed a contract. And I think you breached the contract and I sue you, saying that I have a right to whatever we had the contract for, and you have the duty to give it to me. So claim rights correlate with duties. But then we move on to immunity rights, which correlate with not a duty but a disability. So, for example, the 13th amendment in the United States says that there is no such thing as slaves anymore. So, I am immune from being a slave. And correlatively, everyone is disabled from enslaving me.”

In its chimpanzee cases so far, the Nonhuman Rights Project has been asking for the right to bodily liberty, the lack of which Wise considers equal to slavery.

“You can see easily that we’re not asking for a claim right that correlates with a duty, we’re asking for an immunity right that correlates with a disability … Do you really have to have duties in order not to be a slave? That makes no sense whatsoever.”

What does make sense to Wise is the general discomfort that his organization and ideas often cause. When I asked about the greatest challenge he had faced in his career, he meditated on running an organization like the Nonhuman Rights Project in a world where nearly everyone has grown up not thinking or caring about whether animals should be considered as persons.

“We think that we have the opportunity of making a rational argument to an unbiased court — but the problem is many aren’t unbiased, and bias often takes the form of thinking that human beings are synonymous with persons. But that’s not true now, never was true and likely will never be true. In India, certain temples, mosques, and religious books are considered as persons. New Zealand declared a river as a person. … They have immunities, they have powers, they have all the rights of persons. So it’s about trying to get judges to stop thinking that all humans are persons and all persons are humans. It’s really a barrier we have to break through to have the judges pay any attention to what we’re doing at all.”

In the ideal world, are all nonhuman animals considered persons? Wise doesn’t know.

“So right now we’re arguing that autonomy is a sufficient condition for rights. Or at least the right to bodily liberty. But we don’t say that that autonomy is a necessary a condition. We’re just saying that if you are autonomous, that indeed ought to be sufficient. So those nonhumans animals that we can prove are autonomous can have personhood. And those who we couldn’t, wouldn’t [have personhood]. But we are certain that there are other conditions that would entitle an entity to personhood — we just haven’t reached there yet. But it’s not clear to me what will allow every nonhuman animal in the world to be a person. That means every gnat, every fly, every cockroach. I’m just not sure if they would ever be entitled to rights or not. A huge part of it is scientific investigation. What kind of beings are they? Who are they? We don’t know who almost anybody is.”

Over the years, Wise has faced immense criticism for trying to have nonhuman animals be considered persons. My hesitant question to him about a common criticism I had heard did not faze him: did people often accuse him of not using his talents and legal skills to help humans? He nodded emphatically.

“Oh, I’ve heard that a lot — almost always from people who are not focusing their talents and skills and time on helping other humans,” he laughs. “We have many many supporters among the human rights community — they understand what we’re trying to do, it’s similar to what they do themselves. People who tend to focus on humans understand and approve of what we are doing.”

He concludes with a simple thought:

“There are thousands and thousands of organizations doing things for humans. And there’s only one trying to get rights for nonhumans. So I think all the trillions of nonhumans in the world are entitled to one organization trying to get rights for them.”