Suffers, remembers and can think about the future: the New York Court will have to decide if she has the right to be called a “person” to gain freedom
The New York Court of Appeals will have to rule early next year on a case unprecedented in American law: it will have to declare whether an elephant is a person. The story concerns Miss Happy, an elephant from the Bronx Zoo, who is left alone after all her companions have died. Animal welfare associations would like to free it and place it in a more comfortable habitat, in which it can stay in contact with its own kind. But the zoo objects, says Happy has everything she needs, that they even cut her nails and bathe her once a week.
Activists of the Nonhuman Rights Project, who defend the rights of non-human living beings, have thus had to go to the courts. They got Happy a lawyer, they lost in the first instance, and now they have appealed to the Court of Appeal, which has agreed to debate the matter. «No case like this – wrote“ The Atlantic ”- has ever reached such a high court, anywhere in the English-speaking world. This is by no means a frivolous case. In an age of mass extinction and climate catastrophe, the questions it raises about the relationship between humans, animals, and the natural world concern the future of life on Earth. These are issues that many existing laws are dramatically unable to address. ”
Happy was captured in the early 1970s in the forests of Thailand, along with six other cubs. Elephants protect their young, and capturing a cub almost always kills the mother and the males who come to her aid. Loaded on a Boeing 747, the baby elephants arrived first in California and then in Florida, near the Disney World park, which has just opened to the public. The guardians gave them the names of the Seven Dwarfs from Snow White’s fable, one of whom was called Happy, Gongolo in the Italian version. In 1976 Happy was sold to the Bronx Zoo, America’s oldest, having been founded in 1899, in the time of Buffalo Bill.
More lively than the other elephants, Happy has been trained to entertain children, to stand up on one leg and to play games while wearing polka dot collars, in the perfect Disney style that makes animals behave awkwardly as if they were human beings. Over the years, Happy’s companions died, or were killed after contracting diseases, and today she is left alone, a very sad condition for every human being, but also for an elephant.
The SYour attorney now needs the court to recognize the habeas corpus, ie the pri, for the clientncipio that protects personal inviolability in Anglo-Saxon law. Happy has to be declared a person, and as a person, he can’t be subjected to restraining measures unless he’s accused of something. The concept of a person in American law is very broad: an individual is, but a commercial company, a ship, or a natural environment can also be. Why not an elephant then?
The elefants are ethically better than humans. They are not quite as intelligent, but they are more so than any other animal except monkeys and, perhaps, dolphins and whales. They live in families, protect their young, mourn their dead, do not eat other animals and do not cage them, isolate them and torture them. They know how to distinguish the present from the past, they are able to think about the future. They suffer and understand suffering, they know compassion. In 2015 Happy also demonstrated that she can recognize herself in a mirror, proving she has self-consciousness. Steven Wise, president of the Nonhuman Rights Project is determined to go through with it. “It is absurd – he said – that people pay 40 dollars to be brought to see a being forced into solitary confinement”. But it’s not just Happy: what is under discussion is the treatment that is reserved for the animals of every zoo, every forest and every prairie, each of which would have the right to be considered a person. The Court of Appeal will have to decide something very important: whether we can still claim the right to consider ourselves the masters of the world and its inhabitants, and to do with impunity what we wantmo.
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