Last week, 43 monkeys, all of them young rhesus macaques, ran away from the Alpha Genesis research laboratory in Yemassee, South Carolina, when an employee failed to properly secure their enclosure door.
It was not the first time something like this had happened Alpha GenesisA company that breeds and uses thousands of monkeys for biomedical experiments and provides nonhuman primate products and bio-research services to researchers worldwide. In 2018, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) penalty The benefit is $12,600 in part for other incidents where monkeys escaped. “We are no strangers to random monkey sightings,” said a nearby resident and Yemasi Town Council member to say The New York Times.
Alpha Genesis is now working to restore the macaques, which are about each the size of a cat; By the weekend, there were 25 of them rescue. Meanwhile, animal protection group Dr Stop animal exploitation nowfor which filed the year There are federal complaints against the facility to call USDA to prosecute Alpha Genesis as a repeat violator of its duty to protect animals.
“The recovery process is slow, but the team is committed to taking as much time as necessary to safely recover all remaining animals,” a Facebook post said. post The Yemassee Police Department said, crediting Alpha Genesis CEO Greg Westergaard with the comments.
In a way, this is a story that looks like a corporate failure. But there is another way of understanding this situation, both legally and morally. What if these fearless macaques, who the lab says pose no threat to the public and carry no infectious diseases, have a legal claim to freedom?
The legal status of wild animals is more contested and fluid than ever, as evidenced by a recent court case that Happy, an elephant living at the Bronx Zoo, was a legal person entitled to liberty, stopping the animal’s use in entertainment venues. Circus, and the end of US lab experiments on chimpanzees. While Alpha Genesis may have a strong financial incentive to recapture escaped monkeys, long-standing legal doctrines suggest that the 18 monkeys may not still belong to the company as long as they are free and out of its custody. State officials, or even members of the public, may even be legally protected in rescuing these monkeys from the fate of caged and invasive experiments and bringing them to a sanctuary. Such findings would be important not only for these monkeys, but for the rights of captive animals more broadly.
When a captive animal is released
For many people, the idea of a lost animal becoming another person’s property may seem absurd. Of course, no one would imagine losing the companionship of a beloved dog or cat because the animal wandered out of the yard and someone else found him. Neither law nor morality treats the escape of a domestic animal as equivalent to the forfeiture of all claims to the animal.
But the law is different when it comes to wild animals.
When a captive wild animal escapes, their captor is usually responsible for any damage the escaped animal causes to people or property, but they may lose ownership of the animal, especially if the animal integrates into an existing wild population (sometimes called “reintroduction”). common stock”). This may sound unlikely for rhesus macaques in the United States – the species Native to South and Southeast Asia and exported around the world for lab testing. But it turns out it’s perfectly possible to live as a free-roaming rhesus macaque in South Carolina, where the state’s Morgan Island is home to more than four decades old. Also known as “Monkey Island”.
Originally migrated from Puerto Rico between 1979 and 1980, now Morgan Island Macaques to serve As a sort of reservoir of lab monkeys for the US government. Last year, Alpha Genesis Won a federal contract In fact, the 43 escaped macaques initially lived on the island as “free-range” monkeys, before being used for testing and research purposes, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to monitor the monkey colony there. to say CBS News in a statement. Although these monkeys may not be able to rejoin the Morgan Island colony on their own, the fact that they came from a wild population reinforces the view of them as animals who not only can live in the wild but who deserve to be freed.
Our modern understanding of the legal status of animals derives from 19th-century American common law cases, which adopted the classical Roman legal approach to wild animals, or wild nature. Under that system, wild animals were a special type of property known as “fugitive” property because they could roam freely and were not owned by anyone before being captured by humans. This has created unique legal challenges—for example, conflicts between two poachers claiming the same animal—that can help us understand the case of escaped monkeys.
1805 New York Supreme Court Case Pearson v. PostSometimes considered the most famous property case in American law (and about which one of us wrote. a bookThe starting point is to understand who legally owns a wild animal. In a dispute between two hunters, one who chased a fox and one who swooped in to kill the animal, the case held that the latter had a stronger property interest. Courts have made it clear that a specific capture, and not pursuit alone, is required to establish and retain ownership of wild animals.
In 1898, another New York case, Mullet v. Bradley, went further to recognize that mere capture is not sufficient to claim ownership of a wild animal if the animal is able to escape and regain their freedom. A sea lion that was brought to the East Coast by rail from the Pacific Ocean and later escaped from an enclosure in Long Island Sound was legally free until captured by another person two weeks later, the court found. Such incidents have given rise to a doctrine that legal scholars now call the “law of capture,” which holds that if a captive wild animal escapes and loses control, they no longer belong to the party that previously captured them.
This line of legal reasoning generally works to the detriment of animals, ensuring that every generation of law students learns that animals are ours to possess and use for our own purposes. But in the case of the escaped South Carolina monkeys, the capture law raises questions about whether the lab retains ownership of the animals until they are recaptured.
A recent Canadian case suggests that capture laws may indeed pave the way for the rescue of escaped animals like the South Carolina lab monkeys. In 2012, Darwin, a Japanese snow macaque, became a global media sensation Found wandering through an Ontario Ikea store Wearing a shearling coat and a diaper. Darwin was kept as a pet, a court in Canada governed by That he is a wild animal, and lost his rights after his owner escaped from his car. Toronto Animal Services captive Darwin inside the store and moved him to a primate sanctuary, where he could live among other macaques.
Still, one could argue that the lab monkeys that escaped in South Carolina are effectively pets that belong to their owners. Alpha Genesis has put resources into housing and breeding monkeys on Morgan Island, including managing the monkey population. But unlike domesticated animals that have been domesticated for generations to live safely among humans, these rhesus macaques retain their wild instincts – described as miserlyAnd using food to trap them.
If the monkeys returned on their own, like house cats returning home after a day’s adventure, the legal case for viewing them as domestic animals would be stronger because wild animals, once they stray, must have no animus revertendi, or motive. To return, as long as these monkeys express a desire to remain free without capture, they should be considered wild animals. A 1917 Ontario court case, Campbell v. Headleyinvolving a fox escaping from a fur farm, established a similar principle, discovering that the animal remained wild and thereby freed after escaping from the farm because they belonged to a species that “needs[d] The exercise of art, force or skill to keep them in subjection.”
To be sure, there are cases where a common law court does not lose control of an animal resulting in a loss of ownership. A 1927 Colorado case, Stephens v. Albersheld that a semi-domesticated silver fox that had escaped from a fur farm still remained the property of that owner. And questions about ownership of wild animals are endlessly controversial, as any good student knows Pearson v. Post will tell you
Although these past cases provide important insight into the treatment of wild animals under the common law, none of them occurred in South Carolina, so courts in that state may consider them for guidance but will not be required to follow them when determining who owns what. Alpha Genesis Monkey Escaped (and nothing in this piece should be construed as legal advice).
moral Animal Escape Meaning
Yet trapping laws aside, the plight of these monkeys is also interesting to us as legal scholars because it highlights one of the many disconnects between the law and our moral intuitions about those who escape and those who seek or carry sanctuary. As is the journalist Tov Danovich writtenThere is often great public sympathy and compassion for animals in painful captivity or slaughter in zoos, factory farms, or research labs—even among people who might otherwise tolerate systems that normalize the suffering of those animals. People’s anger when a single cow He was shot dead and escaped Clear and normative lines crossed by authority.
There is something charming and powerful, even romantic, about the idea of an animal escaping, especially if it rescues the animal from captivity. Yet the law generally fails to recognize the moral tension that places on our collective conscience.
In a recent high-profile the case In upstate New York, two cows wander into an animal sanctuary after escaping from a neighboring farm. Unlike the South Carolina monkeys, these were straightforward domesticated animals, and the response from local law enforcement was harsh.
The sanctuary’s owner, Tracy Murphy, was arrested, shackled, and faced criminal charges for refusing to immediately return the cows for slaughter (one of us, Justin, was defense counsel for Murphy, whose case dismissed last month after a two-year legal battle). His assistance to the two escaped cows was widely disparaged by his neighbors and local law enforcement because our legal system continues to treat many animals as property without any recognized rights or interests of their own.
The law is unlikely to quickly abandon the archaic notion of human ownership of nonhuman animals. But we believe the law implicitly recognizes the right to rescue escaped animals, at least those lucky enough to make it under their own steam. We hope that the case of the escaped South Carolina monkey will inspire a conversation about the right of at least some animals to free themselves from exploitation and harm at the hands of humans. Escapes are rare, but when they occur against all odds, we can ask ourselves, both legally and morally, whether animals have a claim to freedom.
