Happy the elephant has resided at the Bronx Zoo for over thirty years. A New York state court ruling stopped a year-long legal effort to address the elephant in the room.
The Nonhuman Rights Project had filed a lawsuit on behalf of the 51-year-old elephant to get her re- homed to an elephant sanctuary, but the New York Court of Appeals disagreed.
Happy is a nonhuman animal who is not a person.
"No one disputes that elephants are intelligent beings deserving of proper care and compassion," the court wrote, but "nothing in our precedent or, in fact, that of any other state or federal court, provides support for the notion."
The group said after the decision that Happy's freedom was at stake and that he remained imprisoned in a Bronx Zoo exhibit.
Ensuring our legal system is free of arbitrary reasoning and that no one is denied basic rights simply because of who they are is something that everyone cares about.
The Bronx Zoo did not reply immediately.
There is a way for people to challenge illegal confinement. Corporations have been granted legal personhood by the courts, which allows them to do things only a legal person can.
According to attorneys from the Nonhuman Rights Project, Happy lives in a one-acre prison and the Bronx Zoo's entire 265 acres are less than 1 percent of the space the elephant would typically cover in a day in the wild.
Monica Miller told the Associated Press in May that she has an interest in exercising her choices and deciding who she wants to be with. She can't make any of those choices herself.
The zoo operators said in a public statement in May that she is cared for and that the Nonhuman Rights Project is using Happy the same way they have used animals in other cases.
Happy's legal team argued that elephants like her should be able to file lawsuits because they are so smart.
According to lawyers, cognitive tests show elephants can recognize themselves. Happy gazed into an 8-by-8-foot mirror and repeatedly used her trunk to touch an "X" painted above her eye.
Joshua Plotnik, an assistant professor of psychology and elephant behavior researcher at CUNY's Hunter, studied Happy's ability to recognize herself in a mirror when he was a graduate student.
When it comes to the welfare of elephants living in captivity, the individual elephant, her personality, her experiences, her relationships with other elephants and with the humans that care for her must be considered paramount.
While he has not worked with Happy since then and now spends a lot of his time studying wild elephants in Thailand, he said that he has always felt that this was a very difficult legal case for both the elephant and the humans involved.
Judge Jenny Rivera dissented to Tuesday's majority ruling, saying that Happy is an autonomously free being. The law has a way to challenge it.
Rivera said that a cage is still a cage. There is nothing dignified about her captivity.
The original article was published by Business Insider.
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