The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows that we are not.
- John N. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Molly Young writes about her meeting with Happy, The Elephant at Bronx Zoo. It's heartbreaking... but thanks to the unrelenting efforts of the Non-Human Rights Project there is hope for future animals.
One recent morning, I zipped toward the Bronx in a Lyft outfitted with a murder room’s worth of plastic. My task: to seek the meaning of solitude from an elderly female who has lived alone, more or less, for 15 years.
Her name is Happy, and she is an Asian elephant. Happy was captured, along with six others, in the early 1970s, “probably in Thailand,” according to The Atlantic. The calves, named after Disney’s seven dwarves, were sent to the U.S. and dispersed among zoos and circuses. Happy and a companion, Grumpy, ended up at the Bronx Zoo. The facility has had a number of elephants over the years, but they have mostly died off, and today there are just two: Happy and a second Elephas maximus named Patty. Owing to interpersonal conflicts of the past, Happy and Patty are kept in separate enclosures. “I always say they’re like sisters who don’t want to share the same room,” Jim Breheny, the zoo’s director, told me.
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The tacit argument of a zoo is that anthropomorphism is a constructive fiction — a way for humans to connect with other animals and develop a stake in their fates. Which is asking a lot of a typical zoo patron. Earlier, I’d lingered by a concession stand called the Pecking Order, which sells chicken tenders across the path from a duck-and-crane pond. The smell of fried poultry mingled with the smell of live birds.
We watched as Happy complied with Michelle’s requests. Seeing the great animal in her pen felt ominous and sacred, like listening to the last speaker of a dying language. Will a kid born in New York City in 2021 grow up to see elephants at the Bronx Zoo? Probably not. The facility has announced that it has no plans to import more elephants after Happy and Patty ascend to the sphere of celestial rewards.
And zoos, in general, are falling out of fashion. Part of that can be attributed to groups like the Non-human Rights Project. More broadly, the public is increasingly aware of animal-cognition studies, which have advanced to a point where one can plausibly argue that an octopus, for example, has a soul. We know that elephants use tools and mourn their dead. They cooperate. They are social animals.
How can we measure an elephant’s suffering when we can’t measure our own?
The historian Fay Bound Alberti has studied loneliness, and she makes a distinction between negative solitude and what was once understood as “oneliness.” Negative solitude, or loneliness, is painful. Oneliness is just a physical state — the condition of being by yourself. Here we face the question of whether Happy is experiencing loneliness or merely oneliness. The position of the Bronx Zoo is that, sure, Happy may be largely denied contact with other elephants, but her bonds with her human keepers are, like those Japanese companion robots or Tom Hanks’s volleyball in Cast Away, a functional substitute. The position of the Nonhuman Rights Project is that Happy is stuck in a kind of elephant Guantánamo and every day spent there is a crime against her being.
In the past year, we’ve all been forced to reckon with the bizarre variability of loneliness. Sometimes it felt good to be estranged from life. Sometimes it was loathsome. How can we measure an elephant’s suffering when we can’t even measure our own?
Happy blinked and threw some dirt on her back. Michelle gave her a handful of sweet-gum branches.
“She’s not going to eat those twigs, is she?” I asked. They looked sharp.
“Oh yeah, she’ll eat them,” Michelle said. “Or mess with them. It depends.”
The monorail came around with a fresh load of passengers, and Happy paid them no attention.
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