Exhibit Grit

When you first meet Steve Wise, he seems like a genuinely nice guy. The words "relentless fighter" probably wouldn't come to your mind. But inside Steve beats the heart of a champion.

He is president of the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), and for 30 years he has been fighting a civil rights battle like none other. Steve is an attorney battling to give intelligent animals some of the legal rights of a person.

I'd better pause here.

He doesn't want to give animals the right to vote or take out a mortgage on a really nice ranch house. In legal terms, "person" and "human being" are not the same. For example, in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision granted corporations the first amendment rights of a person.

In the eyes of the law, you don't always have to be a living, breathing human being to have the legal rights of a person.

Steve argues that certain animals such as elephants and chimpanzees demonstrate a sufficient level of intelligence and self-awareness that they deserve certain rights, such as the right not to be imprisoned in a cage or subjected to "experiments" that amount to torture.

Steve and the NhRP are the subjects of Unlocking the Cage, a documentary about this long civil rights battle; it premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Earlier today, I attended a screening of the film hosted by FiReFilms - an amazing organization in its own right - and got to spend some time with Steve. I asked how he has managed to battle for so long and still remain both patient and tenacious in his efforts.

He told me that this is an epic civil rights battle and that such battles take a very long time. From slavery to women's rights to gay rights, each attempt to extend rights to more humans was met with fierce resistance. In trying to extend additional rights to nonhuman animals, Steve may be fighting an even longer battle, and he knows it.

But he also knows this is his life's purpose, and that gives him two gifts.

The first gift is a sense of calm in the midst of an epic storm. He is fighting a war with the full knowledge that he will first lose many battles. As the film highlights, sometimes his strategy is to lose a battle so as to gain the ability to win an appeal at a higher judicial level.

The second gift is the ability to persist no matter the setback or the time it takes to win. With each passing year, science produces more evidence that intelligence is not limited solely to human beings.

Steve's argues that "the line between humans and nonhuman animals is drawn at an irrational place". He is working to "break a hole in the wall that has existed for 2,000 years", giving rights to humans but none to animals. After he creates that hole, he wants to make it larger and larger.

There are glimmers of hope. On November 3, 2016 in Argentina, Judge María Alejandra Maurico ruled that a captive chimpanzee named Cecilia at the Mendoza Zoo is a “non-human legal person” with “inherent rights”.

Steve is a living example of the power of compassion. He recognized that intelligent creatures are being imprisoned and tortured, and his compassion for these self-aware sentient beings is all the energy he needs to devote his life to a civil rights fight like none before it.

Some think this is a silly or ill-conceived endeavor, but I disagree. Many years to come, I suspect we will look back at Steve Wise and his colleagues and think: these humans saved entire species. They rose above common wisdom to right great wrongs.

If you want to support this unique civil rights effort, the Nonhuman Rights Project needs both donations and volunteers.

And now you know what grit is.