Court Case Update

Dear John,

Today we filed a Motion urging the Court of Appeals—New York’s highest court—to hear arguments in support of our elephant client Happy’s right to liberty. 

• To read and learn more about the Motion, which demonstrates the local, state, national, and international importance of Happy’s elephant rights case, click here.
• For all the ways you can help #FreeHappy right now, click here.

Also today, NhRP Executive Director Kevin Schneider spoke over Zoom with Owais Awan, the attorney who won freedom and sanctuary for Kaavan the elephant through an Islamabad High Court decision that relied in part on key decisions in the NhRP’s cases. The decision recognized the rights of nonhuman animals and rightly referred to Happy as an inmate. To watch a recording of their conversation, visit our YouTube channel.

This is the fourth time the NhRP has asked the Court of Appeals, which only hears about 5 percent of the cases that request to be heard, to decide whether our autonomous nonhuman animal client should be released pursuant to habeas corpus. As we write in our Motion, “The Nonhuman Rights Project respectfully submits that the time to address this question [in the New York Court of Appeals] has arrived.”

The Motion also details how courts outside New York and around the world have begun to grapple with the broader issue of nonhuman animal rights, most famously in the cases of Kaavan the elephant and Sandra the orangutan, both of whom were imprisoned alone in zoos and released to sanctuaries.

If the Court of Appeals decides to hear Happy’s case, the NhRP would argue that it “can and should now put an end to the injustice of Happy’s decades-long imprisonment at the Bronx Zoo and grant her freedom.” As world-renowned elephant expert Dr. Joyce Poole has written in support of Happy’s case, “Simply put, the Bronx Zoo’s exhibit is too small to meet the needs of Happy or any elephant. Happy deserves to live the rest of her life at [a sanctuary] where the utmost care will be given to her individual needs and she’ll have the space and conditions needed to heal and to form psychologically necessary bonds with other elephants.”

Thank you for being part of the global fight for elephant rights!

Lauren Choplin
Communications Director, the NhRP