An animal rights organization has asked the Michigan Supreme Court to hear its case that chimpanzees in an Upper Peninsula zoo deserve constitutional protection against unlawful imprisonment.
The Washington D.C.-based Nonhuman Rights Project, which has already lost twice in lower courts, argues that chimpanzees at the DeYoung Family Zoo in the Upper Peninsula deserve common law habeas corpus rights because they are highly intelligent, self-aware and genetically very similar to humans.
“So far, they have been denied the possibility of freedom based on one immutable fact about their biology: they are not human—although they share close to 99% of our DNA,” said the application filed this week. “Whether this arbitrary denial of liberty is tolerable under Michigan common law now confronts this Court.”
The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled in October that the chimpanzees are not human and so do not have constitutional protections.
The Nonhuman Rights Project’s goal is to have the chimpanzees moved to a preserve with conditions closer to their natural habitat.
The Nonhuman Rights Project has filed similar lawsuits on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants kept in zoos in other states. The organization has not won any of those lawsuits, although some of the litigation is ongoing.
