<mediadc-video-embed data-state="{"cms.site.owner":{"_ref":"00000161-3486-d333-a9e9-76c6fbf30000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b93390000"},"cms.content.publishDate":1654609707363,"cms.content.publishUser":{"_ref":"0000017a-8cb2-d416-ad7a-beb7278f0000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"cms.content.updateDate":1654609707363,"cms.content.updateUser":{"_ref":"0000017a-8cb2-d416-ad7a-beb7278f0000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"rawHtml":"
var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ "div": "Brid_54545734", "obj": {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"1027065"} }); ","_id":"00000181-3e6c-dfdd-a99b-befe7a960000","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video EmbedWhen it comes to defining a right, many activists get it wrong.
A case currently facing the New York Court of Appeals will determine whether Happy, an elephant who has been at the Bronx Zoo for 45 years, has the rights of a legal person. The Nonhuman Rights Project, or NhRP, initiated the litigation by requesting a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful imprisonment, on behalf of Happy the elephant. It argues that Happy is an “autonomous being.”
The lower courts ruled against NhRP, arguing that granting Happy personhood “would lead to a labyrinth of questions that common-law processes are ill-equipped to answer.” But the New York Court of Appeals accepted the case and heard oral arguments on May 18. It is expected to deliver a decision in the coming weeks.
The real elephant in the room isn’t Happy. It’s the fact that a ruling in favor of NhRP would put another crack in the legal foundation for human rights.
The question of declaring an elephant a legal person, as Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism Chairman Wesley J. Smith points out in National Review, is not one about properly caring for animals.
“Such a ruling would indeed ‘break the species barrier’ — as the NonHuman Rights Project intends — blurring the moral distinction between animals and humans,” Smith writes. “If animals are coequal with humans, the concept of ‘rights’ itself would be cheapened in the same way that inflation devalues currency.”
Yet multiple legal scholars filed amicus briefs with the court, including Harvard Law School professor and constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe. USF Law professor Matthew Liebman also filed one, signed by a total of 50 professors.
Even if the New York case doesn’t go their way, the NhRP isn’t ready to give up. They filed a similar habeas corpus petition early last month on behalf of three elephants in California. They’ve already won some cases in other countries, too, such as one in Ecuador for a monkey and in India for all animals.
Many proponents of Happy’s cause connect the case for animal rights to the arguments used historically for granting rights to slaves. The writ of habeas corpus, applied in this case to Happy, was used to argue for the freedom of slaves before slavery was illegal.
NhRP President and founder Steven M. Wise made a comparison between the evil of slavery and the modern treatment of animals in his remarks at a “#FreeHappy rally” following the hearing.
“For centuries, English-speaking humans were considered to be legal things, not legal persons with any rights. It took numerous struggles, for example, to finally decide that all humans were ‘persons’ with rights, irrespective of race or color,” Wise said. “But a million species of nonhuman animals have been considered things, not persons.”
In another disturbing portion of the speech, he compared Happy’s “enslavement” to the wrong of the Bronx Zoo putting Ota Benga, an African pygmy man, on display as an evolutionary “missing link” in 1906. In reality, the comparison further degrades Benga, equating gross injustice against a man to the plight of an elephant.
NhRP’s case is a step backward, not forward. Humans and animals are not equal. The horrors of slavery are not the same as keeping an animal in a zoo. At a time when the personhood of unborn humans is not recognized, it’s also tragic to consider a case like this can reach the court. Some will more readily grant personhood to an animal than a pre-born baby because they don’t understand why human beings ought to be valued more.
Confusion today about what rights are and who they belong to stems from a bigger question: Where do rights come from? Groups like NhRP do not acknowledge, as America’s founders did, that humans are endowed with inalienable rights from the Creator. Consequently, they identify things as rights that are not rights. They’re willing to blur the line, and put real human rights at risk, because they believe there is nothing special about humans.
Rights that are acknowledged by, not created by, the government. As such, the government exists to protect those rights that are inherent to every human being, by virtue of being a human being.
Katelynn Richardson is a summer 2022 Washington Examiner fellow.
