By Luc Cohen
(Reuters) – Should a female elephant have some of the same legal rights as humans?
That is the question New York state’s top court will consider on Wednesday, the latest development in a years-long push by an animal rights group to free Happy the Elephant from the Bronx Zoo.
The 51-year-old Asian elephant has called the world-famous zoo home since 1977.
But four years ago, the Nonhuman Rights Project began asking New York courts to release Happy to one of two elephant sanctuaries in the United States, saying she was being illegally imprisoned.
The group said Happy was entitled to habeas corpus, a legal process in which illegally detained people or someone acting on their behalf may inquire about the reason they are being held.
New York law does not define “person,” and the group said Happy should be recognized as one.
“Elephants are autonomous beings who possess complex cognitive abilities,” the group wrote in a 2018 petition. “Happy’s interest in exercising that autonomy and bodily liberty is as fundamental to her as it is to us.”
Happy has been kept alone in a one-acre (0.4-hectare)enclosure at the zoo since around 2006, court records show. Elephants are gregarious and family-oriented animals with complex social lives.
Her longtime companion, Grumpy, was attacked by two other elephants earlier that decade. He never recovered from his injuries and was euthanized. Another of Happy’s companions, Sammie, later died.
Prior efforts to grant legal personhood to animals, including chimpanzees, have been unsuccessful.
The Bronx Zoo, run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, says Happy is well cared for, and moving her to a sanctuary would not serve her interests.
Jim Breheny, the zoo’s director, has said the push to grant habeas corpus rights to animals “demeans all the people who have sought such relief.”
A New York trial court in February 2020 dismissed the original petition, calling Happy an “intelligent, autonomous being” who “may be entitled to liberty,” but not legally a person. An appeals court later upheld that ruling.
The hearing in front of the Albany-based Court of Appeals, a seven-member panel which generally focuses on issues of law rather than individual factual disputes, is scheduled for 2 p.m.(1800 GMT).
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Sandra Maler)
