The Elephant In The Courtroom

March 2, 2022 1:11 AM

...As for Happy, Breheny declared, with evident frustration, “We are forced to defend ourselves against a group that doesn’t know us or the animal in question, who has absolutely no legal standing, and is demanding to take control over the life and future of an elephant that we have known and cared for over 40 years.” He went on, “They continue to waste court resources to promote their radical philosophical view of ‘personhood.’ ”

According to the Nonhuman Rights Project, it has repeatedly offered to drop the case if the zoo consents to send Happy to one of two sanctuaries, in Tennessee and in California, that have indicated a readiness to accept her. Given the zoo’s stated intention of eventually shutting the exhibit down, its refusal to settle the case suggests an institutional desire to put an end to the campaign for animal personhood. Officials for the society and the Bronx Zoo refused repeated requests to comment for this article.

The Elephant in the Courtroom

See also

The Bronx Zoo's Loneliest Elephant

Nonhuman Rights Project

Nonhuman Rights Project | Client: Happy (Elephant)

First elephant to pass self-recognition test; held alone at Bronx Zoo

ElephantVoices

ElephantVoices on YouTube

The Nonhuman Rights Project Previously on MetaFilter:

Consciousness and Conscience

Thoughts on The Family Dog and Eating Meat

posted by y2karl (15 comments total)

For large, sentient creatures that have had a natural history of complex social bonds, this zoo is an outdoor prison.

For what sliver of natural behavior the public sees, the zoo might as well have an animatronic display: Happy’s inherent magnificence has been reduced to nothing more than a flesh machine

While to staff cares for her, the Zoo cares about its bottom line.
posted by I will not be Heiled at 5:27 AM on March 2, 2022 [7 favorites]

It's a conservative principle that a judge should not make policy, but leave it to the legislature. In theory, this makes sense. In practice, the moving party is left with less than nothing, and in today's polarized atmosphere, it's just unreal. Do animals have time for a hundred-year war of judicial attrition? Do any of us?
posted by Countess Elena at 6:28 AM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think of our treatment of animals as the thing that people will look at 100 years from now and ask what the hell were they thinking?

Also, knowing how social elephants are, I have long been appalled at the isolation from their kind that captivity forces on them. Reading Happy's story now, after two years of my own isolation, I find it even more heartbreaking.
posted by FencingGal at 7:52 AM on March 2, 2022 [8 favorites]

This is a fantastic article. This (sorry, long) segment kinda blew my mind:

A precedent that Wise particularly favors is a 1772 case in England concerning James Somerset, a Black man enslaved to Charles Stewart, a customs officer in Boston. When Stewart brought him to England, Somerset briefly escaped, and upon his recapture Stewart had him imprisoned on a ship bound for Jamaica, where he was to be sold on the slave market. English supporters of Somerset filed for a writ of habeas corpus to gain his freedom. The case came before Lord Mansfield, a consequential figure in the British legal tradition. Although slavery had not been legally endorsed in Britain, an estimated fifteen thousand enslaved people lived there, and hundreds of thousands lived in British territories. Recognizing Somerset as a legal person would not just liberate a single individual but set a precedent that could be financially ruinous for slaveholders. Mansfield declared, “Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.” He ruled that slavery was “so odious” that common law could not support it.

“That was the beginning of the end of slavery, first in England, then at least in the northern part of the U.S.,” Wise said in Tuitt’s court.

“Did they actually say the person who was enslaved was a person?” the Justice asked.

“No, they said he was free, he had rights,” Wise responded. “A person is an entity who has the capacity for rights, any entity who has a right was automatically a person.”

“That’s not what we are arguing here,” Tuitt said. “We are arguing rights or duties.”

“Lord Mansfield never inquired as to whether James Somerset could bear duties,” Wise replied. “It didn’t matter whether he could bear duties—he was entitled to rights.” He mentioned that, under U.S. law, the category of personhood is so elastic that “corporations are persons, ships are persons, the City of New York is a person.” Not long before, he noted, a young man had been convicted of vandalizing a car dealership in Seneca Falls. On appeal, the defendant’s lawyer had argued that the prosecution needed to prove a human being had been damaged by the destruction—and that Bill Cram Chevrolet was not a human being. The court ruled that the dealership was a nonhuman person with standing in the court.

In short, if corporations are people, why aren't elephants?
posted by kaibutsu at 11:27 AM on March 2, 2022 [10 favorites]

I do want to recommend checking out both ElephantVoices and the Nonhuman Rights Project. Or, rather I would, in the case of ElephantVoices...

-- if it wasn't such an ugly user-unfriendly website. Why I can't even to the 10th power -- and the people who designed it : how could they put them on their CVs? How, given the importance of their missions, could they make such awful choices?

Nevertheless, do check them out. They are doing God's work.

That aside, from YT ElephantVoices:

Elephant Merrymaking
posted by y2karl at 1:27 PM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Whoa whoa whoa. Why does the elephant need to be a person in order for us to stop torturing it? Isn't there a way to say that elephants should have rights without granting personhood to elephants?

Come to think of it, isn't there a way to say corporations are allowed to do some things without granting personhood to corporations??

I know it's cute when we anthropomorphize non-human and even non-living things but not when the law does it, ffs.
posted by MiraK at 3:05 PM on March 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

-- if it wasn't such an ugly user-unfriendly website. Why I can't even to the 10th power -- and the people who designed it : how could they put them on their CVs? How, given the importance of their missions, could they make such awful choices?

So today for work I had to look at the Navy JAG guidelines for formatting transcripts of courtroom proceedings. Turns out this super official ~50 page legal documentation style guide for the US Military has titles and subtitles that look exactly like the headings in my personal geocities website circa 1998. Rainbow-ombre 3-D lettering with 20 degree backward tilt and drop shadows for first order headings. Center-aligned Impact font 3-D lettering with blue/black ombre fill, a forced center-converge tilt and, yes, drop shadows, for second order subheadings. Section endings punctuated by a center-aligned cartoon kangaroo wearing a stripey tshirt and nothing else, holding a basket of stars. I swear to God I am not making this up.

There's worse shit in this world, Horatio...

(I should probably add that this style guide did not prescribe itself as the standard to follow, its content was perfectly normal. Now I wonder if it's trying to be intentionally ironic!)
posted by MiraK at 3:15 PM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Why does the elephant need to be a person in order for us to stop torturing it?
This was my first thought, too. It seems perfectly logical and sane that a supposedly advanced species can recognise non-binary levels of consciousness, but here we are proving that wrong.

There's nothing illogical about declaring that animals have rights and deserve to be treated well without necessarily according them the same level of responsibility for their actions as we place on humans. Why do animals need to be declared as 'persons' for us to accord them the most basic of rights?

I feel like the comparison with 'corporations are persons, so why not animals?' is something of a red herring - corporations, under current laws, have to be treated as persons to enable them to be held responsible for their actions and avoid humans hiding behind corporations when they act in despicable ways. Not that this works in any measurable way, of course ...
posted by dg at 3:42 PM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

I know it's cute when we anthropomorphize non-human and even non-living things but not when the law does it, ffs.

Who's anthropomorphizing? Elephants are extremely intelligent sentient creaures. On ElephantVoices, for all my gripes about their design choices, you can find they list something like 125 ways elephants communicate with each other, most of them non-vocal. Elephants are extremely intelligent sentient creaures. As are corvidae, octopuses and cetaceans. And wolves and dogs and cats as far as I am concerned. I know they all are conscious beings who think and feel but I can't pretend to imagine what their thoughts and feelings are. Who anthropomorphizes them? Not me.
posted by y2karl at 4:00 PM on March 2, 2022 [7 favorites]

I know it's cute when we anthropomorphize non-human and even non-living things but not when the law does it, ffs.

So, I’ve only seen this in passing and don’t know enough to attempt any sort of explanation of the details, but the legal concept of personhood is somewhat complex and seems to be not entirely unrelated to what we colloquially think of as personhood as applied to humans, but the overlap also seems to be not as large as one would expect.
posted by eviemath at 9:57 PM on March 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

If corporations are persons according to legal precedent then why not beehives too?
posted by y2karl at 11:24 PM on March 2, 2022

I think it's easy to have a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the use of the word person here. This, from the Nonhuman Rights Project FAQ page, makes it a bit clearer. It has nothing to do with "cute" or anthropomorphizing.

“Person” is a legal term of art, which means it has a particular meaning within the field of law. Simply put, a legal person is an entity that possesses one or more legal rights. You don’t have to be a human being to be a legal person. For example, in the US, corporations are legal persons. Around the world, ships, religious idols, holy books have been recognized as legal persons. New Zealand has recognized a river, a national park, and a mountain as legal persons. In 2017, an Argentine judge recognized a chimpanzee named Cecilia as a legal person via litigation modeled on the NhRP’s; Cecilia is now living in a sanctuary. In 2018, the Colombian Amazon became a legal person. These are only a few examples.

Simply put, in a court of law, you can’t have even a single right unless you’re considered a person, which is why the issue of personhood must be confronted head on with legal arguments that can withstand the inevitable storm of biases and legal errors (from the courts) and fear-mongering and claims of human exceptionalism (from opponents and those who wish to maintain the legal status quo).
posted by FencingGal at 4:15 AM on March 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

Why does the elephant need to be a person in order for us to stop torturing it?

Under current legal structures in the U.S., an elephant needs to be a person in order for anyone to be able to sue on its individual behalf to stop individual torture. Otherwise, you are reliant on governments to enforce animal-cruelty laws.
posted by praemunire at 7:32 AM on March 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

The past Elsewhere is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Nearly 20 years ago, we were discovering and characterising immune genes while working in a Dublin Hospital. The human genome was available and we were trawling through the chromosomal sequences and found some novel anti-microbial peptides. As evolutionary biologists, we asked whether these genes and their protein products might be present in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, our nearest relative. It turned out that a big cheese in Dublin Zoo was the son of our family lawyer and I approached him as a fellow member of the Patriarchy. "Next time you take a blood sample from one of the chimps, can we have 1ml to help push the frontiers of science?". Blood-suckers (Phlebotomists always take 10ml from sufficiently large animals - less for mice! - and there's always some to spare after the vet has carried out all the necessary tests.)
Well really, you would have thought I'd proposed to vivisect his daughter! "We certainly could not have any blood for any purpose except to service the well-being of the bled chimp". The point being that our primate relatives cannot do informed consent, but effectively deserve the same consideration as humans; these rights are vindicated by the appropriate ethics committee. IF we filled in the appropriate forms, submitted an application, secured approval from The Hospital Ethics Committee and the Zoo's Ethics Committee then maybe we could get a chimpanzee turd to analyse. With PCR, and the fact that intestinal epithelial cells are continually being shed into the fecal matter, that would have been enough for our purposes. But the required bureaucracy put a stop to our gallop and we drifted off to chase down easier prey on the prairies of science.
Those primate rights will inevitably get rolled out for other mammals. Dunno about bees, y2karl.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:43 AM on March 3, 2022

Ahem, hive mind?
posted by y2karl at 3:51 PM on March 4, 2022