A New York state court will decide if an elephant in the Bronx Zoo has rights as a person as is advocated by an animal rights group in a lawsuit concerning the elephant’s enclosure, the Washington Post reports.
The Nonhuman Rights Project has argued that Happy the Elephant is an autonomous, intelligent being that is being confined illegally at the zoo. They argue that the enclosure is essentially a prison and Happy has been illegally jailed.
“What we’re saying is that she has a right to bodily liberty and that that makes her no longer a thing,” Steven Wise, president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, said in an interview. “She’s a person.”
Before you dismiss the case as frivolous, let’s address the elephant in the room… okay, not Happy, a different elephant. Anyway, the United States Constitution establishes different degrees of legal “personhood” when it defined slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes.
And related to Mitt Romney’s famous “Corporations are people, too, my friend” comment, courts have ruled that corporations have some rights that are legally granted to people under the Constitution.
Happy the Elephant could not be reached for comment.