Happy, a 47-year-old female Asian elephant, has been living in New York’s Bronx Zoo since 1977. For the past 13 years she has lived alone. Her lifelong companion Grumpy was fatally injured by two of the zoo’s other elephants in 2002, after which Happy was placed in an enclosure with a young male elephant named Sammy. Sammy died of liver disease in 2006. That year, the Bronx Zoo announced that it was ending its elephant programme and would acquire no new elephants. Either Happy will be transferred elsewhere, or she will die in solitary confinement in New York.
In October, the Nonhuman Rights Project, a non-profit organisation that is seeking to achieve legal rights for certain animals, filed a petition in New York claiming that Happy is being “unlawfully imprisoned”. At the Nonhuman Rights Project’s request, the judge issued on behalf of Happy a writ of habeas corpus – a court order that is usually given to allow prisoners to challenge the legality of their detention.
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