The Colorado Supreme Court struck down a national animal rights organization’s ninth attempt to declare animals legal persons in court and secure them the right to challenge their confinement and custody.
Activists with the Nonhuman Rights Project sued the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo last summer on behalf of the facility’s five elephants: Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo. The project’s organizers wanted to get the animals released into a sanctuary under the writ of habeas corpus, which protects people against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment.
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El Paso County Court dismissed the case in June, ruling that the writ of habeas corpus doesn’t apply to elephants because animals do not qualify as “persons” under state or federal law. The Nonhuman Rights Project appealed the case to the Colorado Supreme Court, which has now upheld that decision.
“‘Person’ is a term that attaches to any individual or entity possessing (or capable of possessing) a legal right,” the Nonhuman Rights Project wrote in its October appeal. “…If animals have legal rights, then they are legal persons.”
The state’s Supreme Court justices disagreed with the activists and affirmed the district court’s June decision, ruling that habeas corpus does not apply to nonhuman animals, “no matter how cognitively, psychologically or socially sophisticated they may be.”
Since 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project has filed nine lawsuits, including this one, to free elephants and chimpanzees in New York, Colorado, California and Hawaii. It has yet to win a single case.
Cheyenne Mountain Zoo leaders celebrated the outcome while sharply criticizing the Nonhuman Rights Project in a statement Tuesday.
“The courts have proven now five times that their approach isn’t reasonable, but they continue to take it. It seems their real goal is to manipulate people into donating to their cause by incessantly publicizing sensational court cases with relentless calls for supporters to donate,” zoo officials said.
The zoo is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and has raised more than $1 million for elephant conservation through admissions, according to the organization.
In a statement, Nonhuman Rights Project officials said the court’s decision “perpetuates a clear injustice” and that future courts would reject the idea that nonhuman animals have no right to liberty.
Some Colorado animal activists said they believe the court justices missed the mark with their decision.
“The more we learn about animals, the more difficult it becomes to justify denying them basic rights,” Justin Marceau, University of Denver animal law professor and director of the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, said in a statement. “The elephants in this case are undeniably emotionally and cognitively complex individuals that suffer immensely due to their captivity.”
Marceau said that excluding all nonhuman animals from the right to habeas corpus “has arbitrarily prohibited (animals) from exercising their rights to be free of unlawful captivity.”
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Even if the elephants could be considered persons under Colorado law, the Nonhuman Rights Project still didn’t have evidence to support the claim that they were unlawfully confined, Supreme Court justices wrote in an opinion summary Tuesday.
The “Zoo holds the elephants under a broad framework of laws that permit zoos to hold nonhuman animals for public display in exactly the manner the Zoo is doing,” the justices wrote.
