Last Saturday was the International Vigil for Elephants — a day to remember elephants who died in captivity in the past year. Fortunately, the two elephants in the Bronx Zoo are still alive, but Happy and Patty have been deprived of everything that makes life worth living for members of their species.

Along with my colleagues at the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), I am Happy’s lawyer. In 2022, I argued for her release to a sanctuary and right to liberty before New York’s highest court in a habeas corpus hearing covered by media outlets around the world. Habeas corpus is a centuries-old meaning of challenging the lawfulness of someone’s imprisonment.

Why did we bring a case on behalf of Happy? Because, as the elephant experts who supported our litigation make clear, elephants need and want to live freely just as we do, and they suffer just as we do when confined alone — as Happy and Patty have been since 2006 and 2018, respectively (contrary to all evidence, the Wildlife Conservation Society, which manages the zoo, claims Happy doesn’t get along with other elephants).

As Rev. Patrick Malloy said in his Feast of St. Francis sermon at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in October, “The fact that the court even took [Happy’s] case is a sign that we have come to a new day.”

Among so many other things, elephants are intelligent. They’re altruistic. They communicate with a richness we might never fully understand, they form deep bonds with and mourn the loss of other elephants, and they make complex plans with each other about where to go and what to do.

Happy and Patty have nowhere to go, nothing to do, except to be on display in the same patch of dirt day after day — and that’s when they’re lucky enough to be outside. In the winter months they’re largely confined to what the New York Post has described as “a large holding facility lined with elephant cages.”

If you visit the zoo, you might never know any of this and understandably believe the zoo is doing good, as so many of us grow up thinking, by having elephants there. But visitors are seeing only the ghosts of what elephants should be and learning only that it’s fine to subject other beings to this sort of life. Happy and Patty’s lives have been marked by one loss after another, beginning with the loss of their freedom when they were taken from their natural habitats decades ago. They deserve to be in a sanctuary where elephants with even more difficult histories than theirs have thrived because they can again make choices, roam acres across appropriate landscapes, and interact with other elephants.

No elephant experts supported the Bronx Zoo in court, including WCS’s own. Their silence speaks volumes. Instead, the zoo was supported by profit-motivated trade groups that have nothing to do with elephants while, in the course of our litigation, we gained the support of civil rights trailblazers, philosophers, religious scholars, habeas corpus experts, and more.

Ultimately, five judges on the Court of Appeals disregarded scientific evidence and the law and insisted that habeas corpus and legal rights are only for humans. As the two dissenting judges powerfully wrote, the majority is wrong; we believe their decision won’t stand the test of time. In Judge Jenny Rivera’s words: “A gilded cage is still a cage.”

Had Happy and Patty not been imported to the U.S. to live their lives on display, they could have been matriarchs by now, leading their families across thousands of miles through ancient migratory routes, playing and sharing stories along the way.

WCS purports to care about elephants, science, and education, but its refusal to do the right thing and close its elephant exhibit, as other zoos have done, and release Happy and Patty to sanctuaries — where they can regain some of what they’ve lost — suggests the contrary.

We encourage New Yorkers to keep up the fight beyond the courtroom by advocating to elected officials, being vocal on social media, encouraging sponsors and donors to withdraw financial support from the Bronx Zoo and WCS, joining the protests a group of dedicated local activists are now holding outside the Bronx Zoo, and more. Simply put, WCS will continue to profit from Happy’s imprisonment until New Yorkers say enough is enough. With Happy’s court case at an end, the people of New York now hold the key to freedom for Happy and Patty.

Miller is an attorney with the Nonhuman Rights Project.

Monica Miller

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