Don’t pack your trunk
Court: Happy the elephant stays at Bronx Zoo
Happy the Elephant can’t be sprung from the Bronx Zoo like a captive prisoner — because she’s not a human being, appellate judges agreed Thursday.
The latest court ruling in the historic case dealt a blow to animal rights activists who have for years tried to release the reclusive mammal to a larger sanctuary.
Since filing a lawsuit in 2018, activists — including world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall — have fought to free Happy from her 1-acre exhibit at Bronx Zoo to a 2,300-acre elephant sanctuary.
But a panel of five appeals court judges upheld a lower court February ruling that the 49-year-old elephant cannot be regarded in the law’s eyes as an unlawfully imprisoned human being.
Designating anything other than humans as “persons ... would lead to a labyrinth of questions that common-law processes are ill-equipped to answer,” the panel wrote.
The judges said the decision “of whether and how to integrate other species into legal constructs designed for humans is a matter better suited to the legislative process.’”
A spokesperson for The Nonhuman Rights Project, the group that brought the 2018 lawsuit, lamented Thursday’s ruling as wrong and unjust — but said they’ll keep fighting.
“We’ll now ask New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to hear our arguments,” spokeswoman Stacey Doss said in a statement.
A Bronx Zoo spokesperson said lawyers for Happy have repeatedly failed to consider whether the elephant might be content in the borough she’s long called home.
The activist group “sought to have Happy moved to a sanctuary, a demand they made without knowing anything about her unique personality and behavioral traits and having no understanding or regard about what is best for her as an individual,” a statement from the zoo said.
“Despite what NhRP says, Happy is not kept in isolation; Happy is not languishing; Happy is not kept indoors for half the year.”
Happy the Elephant was captured in Thailand in the 1970s and brought to the United States where she’s lived in the Bronx for more than 43 years.
Happy’s captors named her and six other captured elephants after Snow White’s seven dwarves.
Grumpy the elephant lived in the Bronx with Happy until 2002, when Grumpy was euthanized after two other elephants attacked her.
Happy was the first elephant in recorded history to demonstrate sophisticated self-awareness by passing a mirror self-recognition test in 2005.
She broke records a second time in 2018 as the first elephant to be the subject of a habeas corpus hearing.
After several of her contemporaries at Bronx Zoo died or were euthanized, Happy was left living alone in an exhibit for more than a decade.
Lawyers for Happy argued the zoo’s 265 acres of parkland provided far less than 1% of the space she would roam in a single day in the wild, so there’s no way her joyful name could be eponymous.
Elephants are among the animal kingdom’s most empathetic creatures, scientific research shows. They feel joy, embarrassment, and even grieve when a relative dies.