Scanning the news for mention of elephant this week opens one’s eyes to a diverse selection of stories. Some are good news pieces, others less so. Elements of each should serve to complicate our understanding of this incredible species which, despite recent years of careful study, we still don’t fully understand.
Happy the elephant cannot be considered a legal person
This story, reported on by The Washington Post, is an account of the verdict from New York’s top court. On Tuesday of this week, they ruled in favour of the Bronx Zoo and against the Nonhuman Rights Project, that Happy, one of the elephant which is housed in the zoo, cannot be considered an autonomous person.
The Nonhuman Rights Project sued the Bronx Zoo in 2018. The animal rights organisation argued that Happy, the elephant, should, on grounds of her capacity for autonomy and cognitive complexity, qualify for the same protections against imprisonment as humans. They said that Happy’s name was misleading and that she was, in fact, very unhappy.
The New York Court of Appeals, however, ruled in favour of the zoo. The court ruling conceded that, despite that elephant are “intelligent beings deserving of proper care and compassion”, Happy cannot be considered a person.
If the decision had gone the other way, Happy could have been transported to one of the US’s two major elephant sanctuaries on the basis of habeas corpus, a legal precedent used as a challenge against the illegal confinement of humans.
The Court of Appeals decision to award in favour of the Bronx Zoo was a 5-2 decision, meaning that two of the judges dissented against the verdict. It’s an interesting verdict to an interesting case. The questions arising from it may well be more important, as is often the case in high-profile court rulings, than the verdict itself was.
What makes us human, the court was asked? By extension, the judges were forced to consider what distinctive factors, separating humans and animals, gives us the right to greater protections than they deserve.
The Nonhuman Rights Project, expressing their disappointment in the verdict, stated that this ruling was an opportunity, now lost, to strengthen the values cherished in the American justice system. It was a blow to “autonomy, liberty, equality, and fairness”, they said.
For this writer, this story’s greatest highlight is on issues of understanding. We’re confident of an elephant’s capacity for complex thought, but we still lack a true understanding of their experienced reality. While the Nonhuman Rights Project sought to protect Happy on the grounds of her deserving autonomy, the Bronx Zoo argued that they were also protecting her emotional well-being.
The zoo stressed that Happy was well cared for, that she has a great relationship with zoo keepers and that care was taken for her in a way that was befitting “the magnificent creature she is”.
We may never really know what elephant such as Happy think of their experienced reality but the fact that these questions are being considered, thanks in part to high-profile court cases such as this one, is valuable, certainly, in opening our minds to what is not known. It is only through these sorts of introspective admissions of our own ignorance that we’ll be able to keep an open mind in the consideration of our future as the most dominant species on this planet.
For this writer, this story poses one serious question, that bears careful consideration. Should we be asking ourselves whether it is the being human that’s more important a factor in establishing whether we deserve protections or whether it is the experiences we previously considered the signature of humanity – cognitive complexity, emotive range – that should be what allows access to these freedoms?
Odisha elephant kills woman, returns for her funeral and tramples her again
This is a story that has been much-publicised, and the most salient details of this news story, as they are available to us, are quite well-known. On June 10th, in the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha, an elephant trampled and killed a 70-year-old woman.
The woman was then taken to hospital where she died of her wounds. After medical formalities were completed, she was brought back to the village for her last rites. According to testimonies from other villagers, while the deceased’s body was on the funeral pyre, the very same elephant returned.
The elephant wrought havoc amongst the funeral-goers. It was clearly aggressive and so villagers ran for their lives. Allegedly, the elephant destroyed the deceased’s house in the village, and it even went so far as to kill her goats. Later, after other elephant had been excited into the frenzy, the initial attacker is alleged to have pulled the deceased’s corpse from the pyre and trampled it again.
This story is of an obviously different character to the last but it still poses the question, perhaps with greater need for an answer, as to what exactly elephant feel. If you take this account at face-value, one has almost to admit that this act of violence was personal.
If the evidence of this account can be considered truthful, it seems evident that an elephant is capable of feelings of vengeance, of extreme hatred at the least, and, also, capable of the differentiation necessary to target those emotive responses at a specific individual member of a different species.
Think on that for a second, this elephant was capable of targeting one individual, even to the point of remembering it’s physical characteristics in death, and directing its ire at that individual. Many human beings struggle to separate individual from type within their own species, let alone amongst the individuals of a different one.
Consciousness and conservation: elephant complicating the matter
These two stories pose a variety of interesting questions. Elephant, we can almost assuredly assert, are intelligent enough for a variety of complex emotional responses. We’re fairly certain of the strengths to their memory and we’ve born witness to their acts of ingenuity.
As a part of a species-sized community, we humans can only really trust that our fellow human beings feel and experience as we do. We have the benefit of language and similar facial expressions to give us enough evidence of the fact that we, by in large, experience the world similarly.
Our interface with elephant cannot ever be conducted in the same manner but what, we should ask ourselves, makes us think they don’t feel as we do? The story from India suggests there might be greater similarities between how much hold humans and elephant have over their emotions than previously we thought.
How much should that change the way we treat them?