News Source : The New York Times
Happy the elephant. Image source: BBC
An Asian elephant named Happy that has been at the Bronx Zoo for more than 40 years will remain there after New York’s highest court ruled on Tuesday that she is not a person, in a legal sense, and therefore not entitled to a fundamental human right.
By a 5-to-2 vote, the Court of Appeals rejected an animal-advocacy organization’s argument that Happy was being illegally detained at the zoo and should be transferred to a more natural environment.
The dispute hinged on whether the cornerstone legal principle of habeas corpus — which people assert to protect their bodily liberty and to contest illegal confinement — should be extended to autonomous, cognitively complex animals like elephants. No, the court said.
“While no one disputes the impressive capabilities of elephants, we reject petitioner’s arguments that it is entitled to seek the remedy of habeas corpus on Happy’s behalf,” Janet DiFiore, the chief judge, wrote. “Habeas corpus is a procedural vehicle intended to secure the liberty rights of human beings who are unlawfully restrained, not nonhuman animals.”
But in a lengthy dissent, Judge Rowan D. Wilson said the court had a duty “to recognize Happy’s right to petition for her liberty not just because she is a wild animal who is not meant to be caged and displayed, but because the rights we confer on others define who we are as a society.”
Judge Jenny Rivera, in a separate dissent, wrote that Happy was being “held in an environment that is unnatural to her and that does not allow her to live her life as she was meant to: as a self-determinative, autonomous elephant in the wild.”
The ruling ended what appears to be the first case of its kind in the English-speaking world to reach so high a court. And while it keeps Happy where she is, the outcome is unlikely to quell the debate over whether highly intelligent animals should be viewed as something other than things or property.
The case was brought by the Nonhuman Rights Group, an animal-advocacy organization, as part of a long-running legal push to free captive animals. Last month, even as Happy’s fate hung in the balance, the group asserted a habeas claim seeking to have three elephants removed from a Fresno, Calif., zoo.
In a statement on Tuesday, the group focused on the dissenting opinions, saying they offered “tremendous hope for a future where elephants no longer suffer as Happy has and where nonhuman rights are protected alongside human rights.”
The group had sought to have Happy moved from the Bronx Zoo, which it called a “prison” for her, to one of two vast elephant sanctuaries, which it described as more natural settings that would make Happy’s life happier.
“She’s a depressed, screwed-up elephant,” Steven Wise, the group’s founder, said in an interview before the ruling was announced.