Author Laura Jean McKay
flew across the world to support two chimpanzees seeking freedom in a concrete jungle court.
I heard there were going to be chimpanzees in the New York Supreme Court. The city existed King Kong-like in my imagination so great apes seemed a good reason to go.
In drizzly Melbourne I sidled up to the check-in counter wearing a going-to-court op-shop blazer. I was angling for an upgrade and got extra leg room. Sixteen hours later I checked into a Chinatown hotel in Lower Manhattan, within walking distance of the court.
In the concrete bake of the New York morning, fire hydrants leaked water and grates steamed the credits to Sesame Street. Only a few blocks in I needed a tree and a piece of fruit. I wondered how the chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, were getting on.
Inside the Supreme Court I sat up as straight as I could. I have a guilty face and the law makes me jittery but Justice Jaffe didn’t look like she was about to cast anyone out so I craned my head along with everyone else, hoping to catch sight of the two furry primates. A bespectacled man was present in the room instead.
“We didn’t want Hercules and Leo brought into the courtroom,” he announced. No chimpanzees? This had better be good.
Over the next few hours Steven Wise, founder of The Nonhuman Rights Project (a civil rights organisation that advocates for animals), talked about the lives and rights of Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees who had been leased to the science department of a university for an experiment. They were both one year old at the time – in the wild they would have nursed until they were four years old. Instead, they spent the next six years as part of a study. Hercules and Leo, Wise explained, “are the kinds of beings who can remember the past [and] plan ahead for the future, which is one of the reasons why imprisoning a chimpanzee is at least as bad, maybe even worse, than imprisoning a human being. Because chimpanzees who are imprisoned… don’t know why they’re there.”
As Wise spoke, the wood-panelled walls fell away. I saw the jungles where Hercules and Leo should have grown up. I saw the basement laboratory where they were being held, while we sat free in the court and talked about them. I saw a New York Supreme Court judge lean forward and seriously consider the rights of two chimpanzees in a courtroom set up to debate human concerns. She didn’t grant freedom to Hercules and Leo that day but it was to come. That landmark court case put into motion their eventual release into a wildlife sanctuary in Georgia.
Afterwards I went up the Empire State Building and clung to its top, taking in the endless cityscape, as unfamiliar to me as a jungle. In King Kong, a gorilla-like being sacrifices his safety for the love of a human. In that courtroom, lawyers had dedicated their lives to arguing for the rights of two chimpanzees they’d never met but who desperately needed their help. From the top of the Empire State I looked out across Manhattan, over the Hudson and to a world where I didn’t need to meet someone to know they were worth fighting for.