GROUP ASKS US COURT TO RECOGNISE CHIMPANZEE'S AS PEOPLE

FRANKLIN ONWUBIKO - Walking, talking chimpanzees may be TV comedy gold
but now three courts in New York are being asked to recognize four
chimps as "legal persons" with fundamental rights.
The move would allow the animals to...
be released into sanctuaries where
they could live out the reminder of their days in freedom, says the
Nonhuman Rights Project behind the initiative.
On Monday it petitioned a court in Fulton County Court, New York
State, in the name of Tommy, a chimpanzee held captive in a cage at a
used trailer lot in nearby Gloversville.
On Tuesday it did the same for Kiko, a 26-year-old chimpanzee who is
deaf and living in a private home in Niagara Falls.
The group will Thursday lodge a similar petition on behalf of Hercules
and Leo, who are owned by a research center and used in locomotion
experiments on Long Island.
"The lawsuits ask the judge to grant the chimpanzees the right to
bodily liberty and to order that they be moved to a sanctuary," the
organization said in a statement.
There the animals can live out their days in an environment as close
to the wild as is possible in North America, it added.
The challenge is based on the principle of habeas corpus, which the
petitioners said was used in New York and allowed slaves to challenge
their status and establish their right to freedom.
Under habeas corpus, a person being held captive can petition a judge
to have the captors explain why they think they have the right to hold
that person.
"Our legal petitions and memoranda, along with affidavits from some of
the world's most respected scientists, lay out a clear case as to why
these cognitively complex, autonomous beings have the basic legal
right to not be imprisoned," the statement added.
The courts can decide whether or not to take up the petitions but if
they refuse the organization has the right of appeal.
The Nonhuman Rights Project works to change the common law status of
at least some animals to "persons" who possess fundamental rights such
as bodily integrity and bodily liberty.
The organization's web site features what it calls bios of the four
chimps at the center of the lawsuit.
It said that the day its investigators visited the chimp named Tommy,
the temperature in the shed was about 40 degrees below what it would
be in his native land.
"The only company he had was a TV that was left on for him at the
other side of the shed," the organization said.
As for the one called Kiko, the Nonhuman Rights Project said he is
partially or totally deaf because of abuse he suffered while on the
set of a Tarzan movie before being acquired by the current owners.
"He suffers from an inner ear condition that requires him to take
anti-motion sickness medication from time to time especially during
changes in barometric pressure," the group's web site says.

*Vanguard