Elephants are not people, Colorado Supreme Court rules

Five wild-born elephants that have long inhabited a two-acre plot at a southern Colorado zoo will not be able to secure their own release, the state’s highest court ruled this week.

Responding to a petition from an animal rights group, the Colorado Supreme Courtdecidedthat although these female African elephants are “majestic,” the “interests protected by the great writ of habeas corpus” do not extend to the animals.

The writ of habeas corpus is a legal procedure by which prisoners can challenge their imprisonment. Colorado’s habeas statute, according to the ruling, “applies only to persons, and not to nonhuman animals, however cognitively, psychologically, or socially sophisticated.”

“Since an elephant is not a person, the elephants here have no right to file a writ of habeas corpus,” the court added.

The five elephants in question—Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo—live in Colorado Springs at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, founded in 1926 by the Cheyenne Mountain Zoological Society. Although the animals were born wild, many have been there since the 1970s and 1980s.

The animal rights group, the Non-Human Rights Project, argued that the elephants had a right to physical freedom and were illegally confined at the zoo, according to the ruling, presenting affidavits from several animal biologists who described the elephants as “autonomous animals that generally have complexes.” biological, psychological and social needs” and that they are capable of forming long-term memories. After a lower court dismissed the petition on the grounds that the elephants were not entitled to the habeas statute, the group appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court state

This week’s ruling follows a similar decision in 2022 in New York, when the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of an elephant at the Bronx Zoo.

The judges in the Colorado case noted that other courts have dismissed similar claims “due to concerns about the unintended consequences of recognizing nonhuman animals as persons.”

Instead, the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts “to expand existing legal rights for nonhuman animals—including for Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou, and Jambo—are best done through the legislative branch, not the judicial branch.” , concluded the sentence.

In response to the decision, the Non-Human Rights Project said in astatementthat the court’s ruling “perpetuates a clear injustice, stating that if an individual is not human he has no right to freedom”.

“Future courts will reject this notion, as judges in the United States and around the world have already begun to do,” the group added.

For its part, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo called the lawsuit “frivolous” and stressed that the ruling found no legal basis for taking away the “beloved elephants of Colorado Springs.”

“While we are pleased with this outcome, we are disappointed that it has come to this,” zoo officials said in astatement. “For the past 19 months, we have been subjected to their misrepresented attacks and have wasted valuable time and money responding to them in court and in public opinion.”

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