The elephant in the room: No, pachyderms don’t qualify for habeas corpus relief
Elephants are majestic, intelligent, caring, gentle, communicative and self-aware. They seem to mourn their dead. They are central to ecosystems, key to cultures and totems of religions around the world. Their trunks, which have up to 40,000 muscles, are marvels of mammalian anatomy. The species is endangered by the cruel ivory trade, which deserves to be crushed. Too many elephants for too long were treated shabbily by being made to entertain in circuses. There’s even a moral case, though one we disagree with, that animals this advanced don’t belong in zoos.
But elephants are not people under the law, a basic but essential fact now affirmed by New York’s highest court in ruling against the Nonhuman Rights Project. The advocates sought to apply the age-old writ of habeas corpus, used to bring prisoners before courts to determine whether their detention is lawful. The roots of the writ are in the 39th clause of the Magna Carta: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”
This principle has over time been extended to women, enslaved people, and children. But it can never apply to other species; that way lies madness. Even the project that sought to apply it to Happy, who has called the Bronx Zoo for 40 of her 47 years, implicitly acknowledges this — as they seek to move her to a different form of captivity known as a sanctuary.
Happy may not roam free as an autonomous being with rights and concomitant responsibilities. Nor can chimpanzees or dolphins or whales or dogs or cats or pigs or cows. We will gladly revisit this if and when human experiments give rise to a strain of superintelligent apes that overtake and subjugate us. Until then, it’s challenging enough ensuring human laws are for all humans.
