USA: Elephant "Happy" is not a "person" - and does not have the same rights as a human being

Enlarge image

Elephant lady »Happy« in New York (2018)

Photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP

The case had attracted international attention.

Now a US animal protection organization has failed in its attempt to have an elephant classified by the judiciary as a human being.

So the group wanted to get the animal released from a New York zoo.

The New York State Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request by the group Nonhuman Rights Project to declare the elephant Happy a "legal entity" with a protected "right to physical liberty."

"No one questions that elephants are intelligent beings who deserve proper treatment and compassion," Justice Janet DiFiore wrote in the Majority Opinion.

"Happy" is a "non-human animal that is not a 'person' subjected to unlawful detention."

The judicial review of the legality of detention, known in English-speaking countries as the »write of habeas corpus«, which is intended to protect people from illegal detention, is therefore not applicable to the female elephant.

The Nonhuman Rights Project, which had filed a number of similar lawsuits in the past, sought to have the Asian elephant, who has been living at the Bronx Zoo in New York for 45 years, transferred to an elephant wildlife sanctuary.

She has spent the last 20 years alone in the zoo.

Reference to dolphins and pigs

The organization said the animal, born free in 1971, is an "extraordinarily cognitively complex and autonomous non-human" being that must be treated as a "legal entity."

However, Judge DiFiore said such a move would have profound implications for the relationship between humans and animals, including property rights, agriculture and medical research.

'How about dolphins - or dogs?

How about cows, or pigs, or chickens—species that are usually kept in conditions much more limited than the elephant enclosure at the Bronx Zoo?”

The judgment of the court was not unanimous.

Judge Rowan Wilson wrote in a dissenting opinion that depriving animals of rights testifies to a human inability for "understanding, empathy and compassion."

disagreement in court

Among other things, he referred to the case of the captive pygmy Ota Benga, which was shown to the public at the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

Admittedly, Benga was human and »Happy« was an animal;

but both "suffered a lot" from being locked up.

Wilson also argued that throughout history, society's understanding of the rights of "enslaved people, women and children" has changed.

The same applies to the assessment of animals.

Judge DiFiore dismissed this as a "disgusting comparison."

Animal protection organizations around the world are trying to have animals recognized as non-human legal entities.

In Colombia, the fate of a spectacled bear was disputed in court.

In the end, the Constitutional Court denied the claim to grant the bear the right to freedom through habeas corpus.

An animal client had more success in Argentina, where a court ruled that a female chimpanzee is legally a carrier of habeas corpus.

Life in the zoo is like in a prison.

The monkey lady then came to a reservation in the USA.

jok/AFP