One of these days, one of these animal rights nutcases will come before an equally nutty judge and win a case that frees some wild animal from a zoo.
Fortunately, that day has not yet arrived. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 6-0 on Tuesday that six elephants in the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo cannot be transferred to an elephant sanctuary based on the legal theory that they have the same rights as human beings.
The court said the decision "does not turn on our regard for these majestic animals."
"Instead, the legal question here boils down to whether an elephant is a person," the court said. "And because an elephant is not a person, the elephants here do not have standing to bring a habeas corpus claim."
You have to admit that it's a very clever fundraising strategy by the Nonhuman Rights Project, which has sued a dozen times over the last decade trying to free elephants and chimpanzees from various zoos. They haven't once been successful, but that doesn't matter as long as the cash keeps coming in.
The elephants — Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo — had no intelligible comment.
That doesn't mean they can't communicate. Researchers have discovered an incredible number of sounds that elephants make at an amazing number of frequencies. We don't know what they're saying, of course, but that it's a sophisticated example of cognitive thinking is undeniable.
However, until elephants can submit a legal brief on their own, they are out of luck in American courts.
El Paso County Court dismissed the case in June, ruling that the writ of habeas corpus doesn’t apply to elephants because animals do not qualify as “persons” under state or federal law. The Nonhuman Rights Project appealed the case to the Colorado Supreme Court, which has now upheld that decision.
“‘Person’ is a term that attaches to any individual or entity possessing (or capable of possessing) a legal right,” the Nonhuman Rights Project wrote in its October appeal. “…If animals have legal rights, then they are legal persons.”
The state’s Supreme Court justices disagreed with the activists and affirmed the district court’s June decision, ruling that habeas corpus does not apply to nonhuman animals, “no matter how cognitively, psychologically or socially sophisticated they may be.”
Cheyenne Zoo officials were relieved at the decision and angry at the Non(in?)human Rights Project.
“The courts have proven now five times that their approach isn’t reasonable, but they continue to take it. 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,” zoo officials said.
An "animal law" professor at the University of Denver took time from fleecing students and wasting time to comment on the case.
“The elephants, in this case, are undeniably emotionally and cognitively complex individuals that suffer immensely due to their captivity," said Justin Marceau, director of the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project.
No one is arguing about their intelligence and the complexity of their emotional and cognitive lives. Do they "suffer immensely"? Maybe someday we'll be able to ask them.
Marceau said that excluding all nonhuman animals from the right to habeas corpus “has arbitrarily prohibited (animals) from exercising their rights to be free of unlawful captivity.”
Even if the elephants could be considered persons under Colorado law, the Nonhuman Rights Project still didn’t have evidence to support the claim that they were unlawfully confined, Supreme Court justices wrote in an opinion summary Tuesday.
The “Zoo holds the elephants under a broad framework of laws that permit zoos to hold nonhuman animals for public display in exactly the manner the Zoo is doing,” the justices wrote.
Capturing an animal in the wild and then bringing them to live the rest of their lives in a zoo is cruel. That's why almost all legitimate zoos have captive breeding programs where they buy and sell animals from other zoos worldwide that were born in captivity.
When captivity is all an animal knows, it don't know what it's missing.
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