Elephants Are Not People, Colorado Court Rules

It is, admittedly, a weird decision to have to put on the record – and so, unsurprisingly, it has an equally unusual backstory. It began a few months ago, in October of 2024, when animal rights group The NonHuman Rights Project (NHRP) launched a legal case arguing that the Cheyenne Mountain Five – aka Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou, and Jambo – should be declared “persons” under the law. Such a ruling would then potentially give the animals the right to sue for their own freedom, exploiting a process mainly used for prisoners disputing their detention, AP News explains.

It’s a premise that is, perhaps, not as bizarre as it sounds. Elephants are incredibly intelligent animals: “We know, for example, that they are capable of thoughtful cooperation and empathy, and are able to recognise themselves in a mirror,” pointed out Rachel Dale, now a researcher at the University for Continuing Education Krems, in Austria, back in 2017. 

“These abilities are highly unusual in animals and very rare indeed in non-primates,” Dale, who was not involved in the Colorado lawsuit, explained. 

That’s not all. Elephants show many behaviors we sometimes like to think of as quintessentially human: they bring injured comrades food and water; they comfort each other, and show grief when loved ones die. They’ve even been seen burying their dead. 

“They live in families; they protect their young,” wrote Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, in The Atlantic back in 2021. “They seem to understand themselves as individuals, with thoughts that differ from the thoughts of other creatures. They suffer, and they understand suffering.”

More than that, there’s plenty of precedent for non-human entities being considered “persons” under US law. Famously, companies are “people”; so too are ships and, in some places, nature itself. Is bestowing the concept upon an elephant really such a stretch?

“The elephant suit might be an edge case, but it is by no means a frivolous case,” Lepore pointed out, referencing a previous case also brought by NHRP – that time in New York, on behalf of an elephant named Happy (as in Colorado, the courts ruled that Happy was not a person).

Indeed, for NHRP, the case is clear-cut: the elephants at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo are being subjected to “mental and physical suffering” as a result of their captivity, and are showing signs of brain damage, they argue. It’s worth noting that all five of the animals were born in the wild, in Africa, and captured as infants in the 1970s and 80s. Most were sold to zoos; Jambo spent a quarter-century in a somewhat notorious circus, where she “would have been controlled with a painful tool called a bullhook,” NHRP wrote, “as are elephants still used in circuses today.” 

But that long time in captivity, as well as the group’s advanced age, is precisely why the animals should not leave Cheyenne Mountain, the zoo says. Moving an elephant is no picnic at the best of times, and both of the accredited elephant sanctuaries in the US are a minimum 18-hour drive away. More than that, the zoo argues, after spending basically their entire lives in a small, captive group, the elephants have neither the skills nor the desire to join a larger herd with unfamiliar members.

With that in mind, the zoo is “happy with [the] outcome” of the court judgement, a statement announced Tuesday – although, they add, they “are disappointed that it ever came to this.”

“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,” the statement reads. It points out Cheyenne Mountain’s consistently high rankings by the public; its fundraising for frontline conservation efforts; as well as its “historic” accreditation by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA).

“In nearly 50 years of AZA accreditations, CMZoo was only the fourth organization to earn a completely ‘clean’ report, which means there wasn’t a single major or minor concern reported,” they note – “including in the strenuous review of our elephant care program.”

While disappointing for any elephant hoping to, say, donate to a political party or rent an apartment, the Colorado Supreme Court insists its ruling is – ironically – nothing personal. 

The decision “does not turn on our regard for these majestic animals,” it said.

“Instead, the legal question here boils down to whether an elephant is a person […] And because an elephant is not a person, the elephants here do not have standing to bring a habeas corpus claim.”