Happy, a 55-year-old Asian elephant who had lived at the Bronx Zoo since 1977 and whose uncommon intelligence thrust her into an unusual legal dispute over whether she was entitled to a fundamental human right, has been euthanized, zoo officials said.
Happy’s death, on Tuesday, came after a period of hospice care prompted by a recent deterioration in her health, including a falloff in kidney or liver function, zoo officials said in a news release late Wednesday.
“Following ongoing assessments of her condition and quality of life, this difficult decision was made when it became clear that her age-related conditions had progressed,” Craig Piper, the zoo’s interim director, said in a statement.
Nearly four years ago, New York’s highest court rejected, by a 5-to-2 vote, an animal-advocacy organization’s argument that Happy was being illegally detained at the zoo and should be transferred to an elephant sanctuary.
The ruling ended what appeared to be the first case of its kind in the English-speaking world to reach so high a court.
The organization behind the case, the Nonhuman Rights Project, had argued that the bedrock legal principle of habeas corpus, which people assert to protect their bodily liberty and to contest illegal confinement, should be extended to autonomous, cognitively complex animals like elephants.
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