Elephants may have exceptional memories, but they can forget about being endowed with human rights.
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That’s the finding of the Colorado Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled against an animal rights group’s lawsuit alleging a local zoo mistreated its elephants and caused them chronic frustration, stress, physical disabilities and brain damage.
The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed the suit against the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in May 2024 alleging the park in Colorado Springs kept five elderly African elephants named Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou, and Jambo “unlawfully confined.” The nonprofit group wanted the elephants to be transferred to a “suitable elephant sanctuary,” according to the suit.
The group cited habeas corpus, a provision of the U.S. Constitution that outlines requirements for the detention and jailing of people and offers remedies for getting people released from custody. NhRP had argued elephants have a “right to bodily liberty because they are autonomous and extraordinarily cognitively and socially complex beings,” the state supreme court’s ruling says.
The zoo filed a motion to dismiss the group’s petition and “vigorously disputed” the allegations “pushing back against the suggestion that the elephants were receiving anything short of remarkable care,” according to the court’s ruling. The park also counter-argued that there was no legal basis for the group’s petition because their legal argument “does not extend to nonhuman animals,” the ruling continued.
The court agreed 6-0 and ruled in favor of the zoo on Tuesday explaining that Colorado’s statutes only authorize habeas relief for “any person” and “does not extend to nonhuman animals like the elephants.”
“We conclude that the district court correctly held that Colorado’s habeas statute only applies to persons, and not to nonhuman animals, no matter how cognitively, psychologically, or socially sophisticated they may be,” State Supreme Court Justice Maria Berkenkotter wrote in her ruling.
In a statement emailed to USA TODAY on Wednesday, NhRP said, “Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou, and Jambo are autonomous beings who’ve been stripped of all control over their lives.”
The group also referenced the district court’s ruling, which also was in favor of the zoo despite agreeing with NhRP that the elephants “cannot function normally in captivity.” NhRP appealed to the state’s Supreme Court after the lower court’s decision.
“In upholding the lower court ruling that denied them relief from their unjustified confinement in a zoo exhibit, the Court missed an important chance to deepen our compassion for other beings and to promote the core values of our justice system, such as fairness, dignity, equality, and liberty,” according to the statement.
The district court did note, however, that the elephants likely were exposed to poor conditions and inadequately sized enclosures, but said the Nonhuman Rights Project simply has no standing under the law cited in its lawsuit.
Following the state Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling on Tuesday, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo issued a news release calling NhRP’s lawsuit “frivolous.”
“While we’re happy with this outcome, we are disappointed that it ever came to this,” the zoo said. “For the past 19 months, we’ve been subjected to their misrepresented attacks, and we’ve wasted valuable time and money responding to them in courts and in the court of public opinion.”
The zoo also referenced NhRP’s previous attempts to unsuccessfully sue “several other reputable zoos,” including in New York, California, Colorado Springs and Hawaii.
“If they continue this route – with us or with other reputable zoos – we hope people will remember that NhRP is abusing court systems to fundraise and to pay for ‘legal fees,’ as they claimed in a recent social media video – a.k.a. their salaries,” the zoo said.
“The courts have proven now five times that their approach isn’t reasonable, but they continue to take it,” the zoo said. “It seems their real goal is to manipulate people into donating to their cause by incessantly publicizing sensational court cases with relentless calls for supporters to donate.”
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