The hopes and dreams of millions of chimps were dashed in an instant Tuesday when a judge affirmed that an animal-rights group had gone too far by saying she’d granted them “human rights.”
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe acknowledged that she inadvertently got turned into a monkey’s uncle by signing court papers, submitted by the animal-rights activists, that inadvertently bestowed human status on two chimpanzees being used for biomedical research at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
Proving the movie maxim uttered by Charlton Heston that “some apes, it seems, are more equal than others,” Jaffe on Monday signed a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the primates, named Hercules and Leo.
The judicial command, Latin for “have the body,” is used to determine the legality of a prisoner’s confinement — raising the specter of Cornelius and Zira’s appearance before a Presidential Commission in 1971’s “Escape from the Planet of the Apes.”
But Jaffe got madder than a gorilla handling an American Tourister suitcase when the Nonhuman Rights Project — which wants Hercules and Leo sent to a South Florida sanctuary — claimed that she had “implicitly determined that Hercules and Leo are ‘persons.'”
Jaffe issued an amended order Tuesday that crossed out the words “Writ of Habeas Corpus.”
She also had her principal court attorney send out an email blasting the activists’ “inaccurate press release” and insisting that her order merely scheduled a May 6 hearing in the case.
In a subsequent “clarifying statement,” the Nonhuman Rights Project said that “the court believes at minimum that the chimpanzees could be possibly legal persons…without deciding that they are.”