LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – In a courtroom that’s seen everything from property disputes to murder appeals, oral arguments on Tuesday before the Michigan Court of Appeals featured a new kind of plaintiff: seven chimpanzees.
On October 14, the Michigan Court of Appeals in Lansing heard arguments from the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) seeking freedom for seven chimpanzees held at the DeYoung Family Zoo in Wallace, Michigan. Wallace is a small unincorporated community in Menominee County’s Upper Peninsula, located near the Wisconsin border about 15 miles north of Menominee and the shores of Green Bay.
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The appeal challenges a lower court’s order dismissing NhRP’s 127-page habeas corpus petition without a hearing. Habeas corpus is the centuries-old legal tool used to challenge unlawful imprisonment.
The petition sought a judicial review of the chimps’ confinement and their transfer to an accredited sanctuary. NhRP argued that the trial court effectively denied the chimpanzees any chance at relief simply because of their species.
The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) attorney, Jake Davis, argued on Tuesday in front of Presiding Judge Brock A. Swartzle, Judge Matthew S. Ackerman, and Judge Christopher M. Trebilcock that the zoo’s chimpanzees are being unlawfully imprisoned and deserve a legal right to liberty under Michigan’s common law.
Davis began by telling the judges a grim story – about “Tommy,” a chimp once held in a cage behind a used trailer lot who later died alone on a concrete slab at the same zoo in Wallace. “Tommy died the exact same way he lived,” Davis said, “alone and about as unnatural a place for a chimpanzee as might be found in this country, and invisible in his suffering.”
The judges, however, weren’t quite ready to swing open the courthouse doors to the entire animal kingdom.
“Where do we draw the line?”
Judge Swartzle asked the question hanging over the entire case involving habeas corpus: “If you want us to go over that line into a non-humans…where do we draw a sensible line?”
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He asked about the rights of elephants, dolphins, rats, dogs, cats, snakes and other creatures. Davis replied that there’s no exact line but said the standard should rest on scientific evidence of
autonomy – a quality he claims chimpanzees possess, saying, “They perceive the world just like you.”
The original complaint against the zoo in the case, 127-pages long, cites six primatologists and includes the late Jane Goodall’s sworn declaration describing chimps as “autonomous beings with a highly complex cognitive nature.”
The judges pushed back. One asked whether recognizing chimp rights would mean granting standing to any being that shows self-awareness. Another pointed out the obvious: humans can enter social contracts and obey laws – chimpanzees cannot.
Davis countered that many humans – such as children or those in comas – also can’t consent to social contracts yet still have basic rights. “Chimpanzees are different from humans,” he argued, “but not different for purposes of habeas corpus.”
The “prisoners of Wallace.”
In the NhRP’s original complaint, the seven chimps – identified as Prisoners A through G – are described as autonomous, emotionally complex beings “illegally imprisoned at a roadside zoo” incapable of meeting their social and psychological needs.
NhRP wants the court to order the DeYoung Zoo to justify their confinement and, ideally, transfer them to a sanctuary accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS) giving them “autonomy to the greatest extent possible.” However, when pressed about whether that still counts as captivity, another form of confinement, Davis admitted that it did.
No word from the zoo.
The DeYoung Family Zoo didn’t have to attend the hearing in person and has not commented publicly about the case. The zoo, featured years ago on National Geographic’s “My Life Is a Zoo” faced prior challenges in 2016 from PETA over its treatment of chimpanzees Louie and Tommy, who the animal rights group alleged were being kept in isolation.
The zoo is a private one owned by Harold “Bud” DeYoung and wife Carrie Cramer and houses hundreds of animals, focusing on big cats like lions and tigers; chimpanzees; mammals such as bears, hippopotamuses, camels, kangaroos, arctic wolves, coyotes, dingoes, and domestics like horses, pigs, and alpacas. It also features reptiles, birds (geese, ducks, chickens), and rehabilitated local wildlife like white-tailed deer.
A case of monkey see, monkey sue.
The chimpanzee case is the first in Michigan history to test whether animals can file a writ of habeas corpus. Legal experts call it a long shot. Previous NhRP cases in New York – on behalf of elephants and other chimps – failed to free their clients from captivity.
If the Michigan Court of Appeals agrees to issue an order to show cause, it would force the DeYoung Zoo to explain why the chimps should remain confined – a first step toward what animal-rights advocates see as historic recognition.
For now, though, the chimpanzees remain in a zoo in the Upper Peninsula, while their advocates wait for a ruling that could make legal history.
