Five wild-born elephants that have long inhabited a 2-acre plot in a southern Colorado zoo will not be able to pursue their own release, the state's highest court ruled this week.
Responding to a petition from an animal rights group, the Colorado Supreme Court decided that although these female African elephants are "majestic," the "interests protected by the great writ of habeas corpus" does not extend to animals.
The writ of habeas corpus is a legal procedure through which prisoners can challenge their incarceration. Colorado's habeas statute, the ruling stated, "only applies to persons, and not to nonhuman animals, no matter how cognitively, psychologically or socially sophisticated they may be."
"Because an elephant is not a person, the elephants here do not have standing to bring a habeas corpus claim," the court added.
The five elephants in question — Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo — live in Colorado Springs at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, founded in 1926 by the Cheyenne Mountain Zoological Society. While the animals were wild-born, many have been there since the 1970s-1980s.
The animal rights group, the Nonhuman Rights Project, argued that the elephants had a right to physical liberty and were illegally confined in the zoo, according to the ruling, submitting affidavits from multiple animal biologists who described the elephants as "autonomous animals that generally have complex biological, psychological and social needs" and who are capable of forming long-term memories. After a lower court dismissed the petition because the elephants did not have standing under the habeas statute, the group appealed to the state Supreme Court.
This week's ruling follows a similar decision made in 2022 in New York, when the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a suit on behalf of an elephant at the Bronx Zoo.
The judges in the Colorado case noted that other courts have dismissed similar claims "due to concerns regarding the unintended consequences of recognizing nonhuman animals as persons."
Instead, the efforts of the Nonhuman Rights Project "to expand existing legal rights for nonhuman animals — including for Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo — are best advanced through the legislative, not judicial, branch," the ruling concluded.
In response to the decision, the Nonhuman Rights Project said in a statement that the court's ruling "perpetuates a clear injustice, stating that unless an individual is human they have no right to liberty."
"Future courts will reject this notion, as judges in the United States and around the world have already begun to do," the group added.
For its part, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo described the lawsuit as "frivolous," stressing that the ruling found no legal basis to remove the "beloved elephants away from Colorado Springs."
"While we're happy with this outcome, we are disappointed that it ever came to this," zoo officials said in a statement. "For the past 19 months, we've been subjected to their misrepresented attacks, and we've wasted valuable time and money responding to them in courts and in the court of public opinion."