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By Vicki Croke, Globe Staff, 03/18/2000

EEDHAM - Meet Steven Wise.

He listens to Mozart. He loves the early Greek and Latin scholars (Homer, Cicero, Euripides), history (Stephen E. Ambrose's take on Lewis and Clark), and anything devoted to his favorites - Abraham Lincoln, the Apostle Paul, and Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher and author of "Four Essays on Liberty."

He is unself-conscious enough to dance the hokeypokey with his 2-year-old twins, Christopher and Siena, in the presence of a stranger. He's a vegan both repulsed and still tempted by meat. And he's not the least bit maudlin about animals. His friend, primatologist Jane Goodall, calls him a "sissy" because he's queasy around snakes.

He's also the country's most prominent - and talked about - animal rights attorney. He may get nauseated touching snakes, but, he says, "in a proper case I would go in and fight for them." Over the battered desk in his basement office hangs a cartoon that gently mocks the animal rights movement: A dog raises its paw on the witness stand before a sign that reads "Rover v. Wade." In a politically charged environment, his sense of humor and lack of sentimentality come as a surprise.

"To me, justice and how I feel personally about a non-human animal don't have to connect," he says. "My passion for getting justice for non-human animals comes more from the justice than from the non-human animals."

Yet in courtrooms, on call-in radio talk shows, and in debates, foes often expect him to be emotional, hysterical even.

Hardly. An experienced litigator, Wise, 49, says he is accustomed to the other side's attempts to refute every single thing he says. His feelings don't get hurt.

That's good, because right now, Wise is at the center of a heated debate over animal rights. An article about his work in this month's ABA Journal comments: "Dismissive readers should note that Wise has touched upon a high-profile national controversy."

After 20 years of doing battle in court for animals, he is teaching the first course at Harvard Law School on animal rights law. His book, "Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals" (Perseus Books, $25), is already in its second printing a month after its release.

Wise's goal with "Rattling the Cage" is, he says, to "break down the wall" that separates humans and animals under the law. He wants to give other primates the status of personhood, which would end lab experiments on chimpanzees and perhaps free them from zoos.

Wise is fond of his cat and dog, but his feelings for chimps go much deeper than fondness. He compares them to his toddlers.

"The way I feel about chimpanzees is the way I feel about humans," he says. "To me they can hardly be distinguished from humans - they are like rough, strong, headstrong, id-run-wild humans. They're like Christopher but 100 times stronger than he is. They are other nations who deserve our immense respect."

Respect is sometimes in short supply in heated animal rights discussions. On AM radio Wise has been called a nut, a "communist" (that was in Des Moines), and worse.

Some law professors have taken issue with him in a more civil manner. Richard Epstein, of the University of Chicago, made his disagreement clear in the National Review last fall: "While I do care about the welfare of animals, I consider the welfare of humans a higher concern."

Wise takes them all on with relish. To fundamentalist Christians, he cites Scripture. "That really drives them crazy," he says.

And in debates with members of the biomedical research world, he is brutally logical. Looking at his daughter watching an Elmo video, he says, "What if Siena's life could be saved by killing a bonobo [often misleadingly called pygmy chimpanzees]? I'd say yes. But if Siena's life could be saved by killing you, that would be OK with me as well. So what does that prove? It proves that loving fathers are willing to do anything to save the lives of their children. But I'm being outrageously biased and unjust, and that might be the way fathers act, but that's not the way judicial systems are supposed to act or fair societies are supposed to act."

That sort of talk is getting him noticed.

In the March 13 issue of Time, writer Lance Morrow notes, "Wise is serious about the work and, the more you think about it, reasonable."

"Rattling the Cage" is, indeed, a methodical, and sometimes funny and moving, legal brief. It outlines the ancient basis for our current legal system and delves deeply into issues of rights, freedom, and slavery.

It is the comparison between our treatment of the great apes and the slaves in the past that resonates most with Wise.

And, not surprisingly, it is to Abraham Lincoln that this compassionate but zealous animal rights attorney turns for wisdom.

"You look at the executions for desertion that Lincoln commuted," Wise says. "He was very, very sympathetic to the weaknesses of human beings. He understood how we all get frightened and we all get angry and we all get all sorts of things. We're not saints. Lincoln really understood that. And he always tempered justice with mercy."

This story ran on page F01 of the Boston Globe on 3/18/2000.
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