‘Elephants here do not have standing’: Colorado Supreme Court rules elephants don’t have human rights, must stay at zoo

An elephant at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado is shown behind a fence. (screengrab via KCNC-TV)

Colorado’s top court ruled Tuesday that five elephants confined in a local zoo do not have the right to seek habeas corpus relief because no court in the United States “has ever recognized the legal ‘personhood’ of any nonhuman species.”

The Nonhuman Rights Project (NRP), an advocacy organization that seeks legal rights for intelligent animals, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of five elephants in 2023 to end their “unjust confinement.” According to the group’s website, it uses habeas corpus proceedings specifically as a “centuries-old means of testing the lawfulness of one’s imprisonment before a court,” that had a long history of being used to secure rights for enslaved people, “freeing [them] unequivocally and essentially transforming [them] from a legal thing to a legal person.”

Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo are five elephants that NRP said are being confined illegally at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs and should instead be moved to a sanctuary. In its petition, NRP argued that elephants are autonomous and extraordinarily cognitively complex beings with complex biological, psychological, and social needs that cannot be met at a zoo.

“Elephants are meant to live as self-determinative, autonomous beings in the wild,” it argued. “When forced to live in an unnatural environment, they suffer greatly as a result.”

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