Specific Rights in Nonhuman Animal Rights Declarations (Part 3)

On 6 February 2007 an application for guardianship of a man named Mathias Hiasl Pan, born in 1981 in Sierra Leone, and living in Vösendorf was filed at the District Court of Mödling, Lower Austria (Balluch 2014, 84ff). When the judge read Mr. Pan’s residential address, she became suspicious, because the residential address was the address of an animal shelter in Vösendorf (ibid.). Mr. Pan was, in fact, not a Homo sapiens, but a Pan troglodytes, i.e. a chimpanzee. However, the initiators of the application for guardianship—Martin Balluch and his colleagues—were quite serious in their application. They wanted to have the chimpanzee Hiasl, who had initially been bought by a pharmaceutical company as a laboratory animal, but was, as of 2006, housed in the animal protection centre in Vösendorf, which had had to file for bankruptcy, placed under guardianship (ibid.). Hiasl’s welfare was directly threatened at this time: he was to be sold as part of the bankrupt estate, potentially either to a foreign circus—since a ban on wild animals in circuses in Austria has been in force since 2005 (Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes n.d.-b, § 27)—or to an animal experimentation laboratory abroad—as, again, in Austria, experiments on great apes, for purposes other than their inherent interests or their own wellbeing, have been prohibited since 2006 (ibid. n.d.-c, § 13). He therefore stood not only to be sold, but possibly even killed. A group of animal rights activists tried to source the living costs for Hiasl; these, however, could only be donated to the animal shelter in Vösendorf, which meant that they would then directly go to the creditors, rather than reaching Hiasl; in order to be able to help Hiasl, Balluch and his colleagues thus applied for guardianship of Hiasl (Balluch 2014, 84ff).