Rattling The Cage: Toward Legal Rights For Animals

The scholar and author of An American Trilogy makes the case to establish legal rights for chimpanzees and bonobos.   Rattling the Cage explains how the failure to recognize the basic legal rights of chimpanzees and bonobos in light of modern scientific findings creates a glaring contradiction in our law. In this witty, moving, persuasive, and impeccably researched argument, Wise demonstrates that the cognitive, emotional, and social capacities of these apes entitle them to freedom from imprisonment and abuse.   “The animals’ Magna Carta.” —Jane Goodall, from the Foreword   “This is an impassioned, fascinating, and in many ways startling book.” —Cass Sunstein, New York Times Book Review   “One of those rare books that are deeply troubling in the best sense of the word, intellectually and ethically.” —Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University   “Path-breaking…Every lawyer, every judge, and every legislator should read this book.” —Peter Singer, Princeton University   “Documenting the treatment of our close primate cousins, which are routinely kidnapped for biomedical research, slaughtered for their meat and caged in roadside zoos, Wise notes that chimpanzees and bonobos are nearing annihilation . . . . This impassioned, closely argued brief presents a formidable challenge to the treatment of animals perpetrated by agribusiness, scientific research, the pharmaceutical industry, hunters, live-animal traders and others. It’s a clarion call for rethinking the animal-human relationship.” —Publishers Weekly