How messed up creatures are we...? Who gave us the right to test and decide another beautiful being if they are self-aware or not and chain her in a zoo for 43 years? If such cruelty doesn't trouble one morally not sure if we are eligible to call ourselves "self-aware", whatever crap that means.
Listen to this three-part podcast on the life of an Elephant named Happy (a nonsensical name given we chained and robbed 43 years of her life):
Welcome to 1970s America: Watergate, the end of the Vietnam war, Hollywood, the birth of Apple…
We are in California, just south of LA…
This is the world that greeted a young elephant, wrenched from her home and family, packed into a crate, and shipped to the other side of the world. She was not yet two years old.
But she was always a little special.
Back in New York in the 1970s, Happy was a celebrity. She wore a blue-and-black polka-dotted dress trimmed with tassels and studded with rhinestones. Once a year, while thousands of people cheered her on, she’d do a tug-of-war against teams of jocks – and always win.
Twenty years ago she hit the headlines again, this time for being smart rather than strong. She was the first elephant ever to take an experiment designed to test if an animal is self-aware enough to recognise itself – and she passed. That was quite a moment. It’s key to this whole story, and we’ll come back to it in episode two.
Now Happy is 49 years old and making what could be her biggest news splash of all. She’s caught up in a high-octane battle over her future – about whether she stays in the Bronx Zoo, where she’s lived for 43 years, or she’s moved to an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee.
Next month, those five judges could change her life with one bang of the gavel. The decision – and what could be Happy’s retirement years – rests on whether the man who calls himself Happy’s lawyer can convince the court that an elephant can be a legal “person” and, if so, that she’s being unlawfully detained in one of America’s most-venerable zoos.
Happy’s case is about more than her future. It’s about our relationship with the animals that live among us, and which sustain us – as food, as clothing, or in any number of industrial processes. There are over 600,000 animals and birds in around 10,000 zoos worldwide. In Britain alone, we keep around 51 million animals as pets – at the last estimate. There are more tigers in captivity in China than in the wild in the whole world. And, as we have found out this year, the way we interact with animals can have deadly consequences.
And so if Happy becomes the first elephant to be granted rights like we have – the right to bodily freedom – the trumpet could sound on a new era, and not just for her. How much do we really know about the animals around us – in our homes, our zoos, our farms and our factories? And is now the time to start rewriting their place in our world?
The end of those big arguments is some way off. But we know where they might begin; in the New York Supreme Court in just a few weeks with the case of Happy the elephant.
This podcast is part of the Non-Human Rights Project. They are doing some heartbreaking work, thank you, thank you, thank you from Max and me. I still live and breathe after Max is only and only because of humans like you who are still trying and fighting atrocities. Fuck hope, you give me a reason to live and fight.
You can support this project by ordering T-shirts here and they are beautiful.
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