The death of Steven Wise is a major loss for animals, though, thankfully, his books and other writings will endure.  The one  time  I met Steven Wise in person was at the end  of a showing of a documentary about his work, "Unlocking the Cage" [ https://archive.org/details/unlocking-the-cage].  After the film I went up to ask a question based on an article of his published  in ANIMAL RIGHTS: CURRENT DEBAES AND NEW DIRECTIONS, edited by Martha Nussbaum and  Cass Sunstein.  He'd written about the many obstacles to animal rights and  to attaining legal personhood for animals.  And he made many comparisons between animal and human slavery.  The question I asked centered on one point in his article, which was this.   He'd written that in the 1830's it was inconceivable to most people that black slaves of the United States would attain freedom, and yet only a few decades later President Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation, and a couple of years thereafter the 13th Amendment was ratified, which abolished slavery for all humans except prisoners.  Today human slavery is almost universally reviled.  There's no reason, therefore, he argued, despite the fact that most humans still regard nonhuman animals as property or  things, not to believe that the animals won't be liberated from human tyranny in a similarly short period of time.  And that would happen primarily through their being re-defined by law as persons instead of property.  Given, I asked, that in 1975--the year Peter Singer's ANIMAL LIBERATION was published--the number of land animals slaughtered for food annually in the United States was about 3 billion, whereas today, four decades later, more than 10 billion are slaughtered annually, did he still hold  his optimistic position.  He stated emphatically that he  did.   He  argued  that  the current  horrors--and I mentioned others, such as the proliferating of "ag-gag" laws--were largely backlash, which he interpreted  as an inverted sort  of recognition of  the rising  of animal rights.  I left with a feeling of skepticism, though, to my amazement, many astonishing breakthroughs for animals did indeed occur  since  that time.  And despite the steady rise of  slaughter numbers in the US over many decades, there  was finally a leveling  off after about 2010, and as of 2022, the numbers dropped to about 9 billion,  with the  dramatic plummeting  of the consuming of animal flesh in this  country.  There is, moreover, a growing  consensus among  scientists that animal agriculture is THE leading  cause of climate  change--though that fact is still widely suppressed.  The state of Vermont is beginning to help dairy farmers transition to crop farming.  Factory farms are beginning to shut down, their evils being exposed.  Slaughterhouse workers--and politicians--are starting to go vegan. Vegetarians and  vegans are no longer dismissed as weird.  Though progress is very slow, there is such a thing as miracles.  Thank you for your work and faith, Steven Wise. RIP.