Our first client, Tommy, was a chimpanzee taken away from his mother almost immediately after birth in a chimpanzee breeding facility. A newborn chimpanzee’s entire world is his mother. He clings to her body constantly—practically 24 hours a day. Her heartbeat, warmth, scent, and movements are what tell him he’s safe. It’s not hard to imagine Tommy’s fear and anxiety after this bond was severed by people who made money from selling him. Years later, USDA records described how Tommy died at the DeYoung Family Zoo, “curled up in his sleeping spot” inside a building, deprived of the comfort of other chimpanzees in his first moments and his last. We continue to fight for the right to liberty of the seven chimpanzees who remain in the DeYoung Family Zoo.
Our elephant client Angeline was only moments old when a handler with a bullhook dragged her away from her mother, Savanna, at the Pittsburgh Zoo. As captured on video, the handler shouts with impatience to Savanna and Angeline: “GET OVER. Come here. COME HERE.” Savanna—who, as a free-living elephant in her natural habitat, wouldn’t have let her newborn out of her sight—was chained up in a dirty, barren cell, physically unable to protect and tend to her own child, with no choice but to endure what was happening.
Zoos call this “management” of the elephants and pretend it’s for the elephants’ own good. In truth, it’s cruel and unnatural interference with the most essential bond in an elephant’s life. Angeline was ultimately returned to Savanna, but both remain confined in the same exhibit where they’ve been oppressed for decades, and there’s nothing stopping the zoo from permanently separating them.
These broken bonds, these traumas that never should have happened, are one reason the NhRP exists and why we’re fighting not for improved treatment or better exhibits, but for freedom. While our clients’ captors pay lawyers and lobbyists to fight to keep our clients imprisoned and exploited, we fight for them–for them to have the lives they were meant to have. That’s what your support makes possible. Today on Giving Tuesday, please consider donating to the Nonhuman Rights Project so we can keep pushing the law to recognize a simple truth: every autonomous being deserves freedom.
We’ve already made huge strides toward securing fundamental legal rights for animals—including first-of-their kind hearings on the lawfulness of chimpanzees’ and elephants’ imprisonment, powerful judicial opinions in support of their right to liberty, and passage of the first piece of legislation to protect an elephant’s right to liberty—and we’re building momentum for even more progress in 2026. Please help us restore nonhuman animals’ freedom and grow the movement for nonhuman animal rights next year by making a donation today if you can. To everyone who’ s already donated: thank you.
With gratitude,
The NhRP
