Why Elephants Are Not People

In a controversial ruling, the New York Court of Appeals recently decided that elephants are not people with constitutional rights. While this would seem to be a no-brainer, animal rights advocates believe that giving animals more rights is a natural progression from a few hundred years ago when only the aristocracy had what we conventionally regard as human rights. Since then, rights were extended first to property owners, then all white men, then women, and then blacks and other minorities.

Elephants at the Bronx Zoo. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

In the New York case, two elephants in the Bronx Zoo were forced to live together in a confined area even though they did not get along. A group called the Nonhuman Rights Project argued that such imprisonment violates the right of habeas corpus and the elephants should be allowed to sue so that they could be released into a larger sanctuary.

The court pointed out that extending constitutional rights to elephants “would call into question the very premises underlying pet ownership, the use of service animals, and the enlistment of animals in other forms of work.” This “would have an enormous destabilizing impact on modern society.”

That’s the wrong argument. Animal rights supporters will be quick to point out that earlier courts could have made the same argument about extending rights to blacks, women, non-property-owning white men, and other groups. “If we give men who don’t own property the right to vote, what next? Will we have to give women the right to vote too? What about blacks? Where will it all end?”

The right argument is completely different. Unlike blacks, women, and non-property-owning men, elephants can’t speak for themselves. They can’t tell an attorney or a judge what they really want. They can’t sign legal papers and know what they are agreeing to.

Groups such as the Nonhuman Rights Project say this isn’t a problem: they will speak for the elephants. What they mean is they will project their preferences on the elephants without knowing whether the elephants really want those things. It is easy to imagine the next step: they will claim that the elephants don’t really want a particular development, or a new road, or people to use fossil fuels, and try to use public sympathy for elephants to attain objectives that the people who claim to be speaking for them want, regardless of what the elephants need or want. (I haven’t read the court decision; it’s possible that it also made this argument but it wasn’t reported by the media.)

I support animal cruelty laws and protection of rare species. But we have to remember that domestic animals are doing better than wild animals precisely because they have value to their owners. Proposals by groups such as the Nonhuman Rights Project would ultimately take away the value of wildlife to private owners, leading more owners to try to wipe out such wildlife. That exactly the opposite of what we need to do to protect rare species.