{"id":763259,"date":"2021-03-19T08:58:42","date_gmt":"2021-03-19T12:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=763259"},"modified":"2021-03-19T09:02:35","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T13:02:35","slug":"meditations-on-loneliness-43-minutes-with-happy-the-elephant-at-the-bronx-zoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=763259","title":{"rendered":"MEDITATIONS ON LONELINESS: 43 Minutes With Happy the Elephant at the Bronx Zoo"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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The public is increasingly aware of animal-cognition studies. We know that elephants use tools and mourn their dead. They cooperate. They are social animals.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

MOLLY YOUNG:<\/strong> One recent morning, I zipped toward the Bronx… 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… The calves, named after Disney\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI\u202falways say they\u2019re like sisters who don\u2019t want to share the same room,\u201d Jim Breheny, the zoo\u2019s director, told me…<\/p>\n

It was, I should clarify, my third time glimpsing Happy. On two earlier visits… Happy had been standing motionless with her back turned, which didn\u2019t seem to require a lot of interpretation. This time, Happy perked to attention. Some of her keepers were there, too. \u201cC\u2019mere, Hap!\u201d one of them, a woman named Michelle, yelled.<\/p>\n

Happy walked over and coiled her trunk through the fence to accept a banana from the keeper\u2019s bucket. The dynamics of an elephant trunk are tough to describe: Imagine an octopus arm crossed with a PVC tube. In some places, Happy\u2019s skin looked like wrinkled chamois. In others, like a callus. She smelled of warm hay and vegetation. I\u202fsquatted down to look up at her belly and spied a nipple, which sparked the first of several sorrowful thoughts: In another life, Happy could have been a mother…<\/p>\n

These days, a barrier separates Happy from her keepers; they reach through a fence to offer her fruit, trim her toenails, inject her medicine. Happy\u2019s bath involves a number of long-handled brushes. She has been trained to respond to verbal commands. \u201cRear foot up,\u201d said Michelle. Happy put one of her feet on the fence and was awarded a banana. \u201cOpen,\u201d Michelle said. Happy opened her mouth and received a carrot. Patty eyed us from the far corner of her own enclosure.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people say they\u2019re in isolation, it\u2019s just not true,\u201d Breheny said. \u201cThey just can\u2019t get in the same space as each other.\u201d This was a curious statement to parse. By \u201cpeople,\u201d Breheny was referring to the Nonhuman Rights Project, a nonprofit led by the lawyer and scholar Steven Wise. Wise has spent the past few decades trying to rewire the way Americans conceive of animal rights.<\/p>\n

In 2018, his organization adopted Happy as a client, arguing that she was being unlawfully detained by the Bronx Zoo and ought to be granted a writ of habeas corpus. Since then, the nonprofit and the zoo have gone back and forth, filing motions and affidavits and going before judges for oral argument in multiple counties… So far, the courts have taken the zoo\u2019s side…<\/p>\n

Then there is the second half of Breheny\u2019s remark, which raises the question of what \u201cisolation\u201d means. Would we consider a human isolated if she lived in a pen within touching distance of another human? Can you even compare an elephant to a human? For biologists, it is axiomatic that the \u201chuman versus animal\u201d distinction is incorrect, that the binary is in fact an Earth-size spectrum of consciousness. We\u2019re all just bags of flesh, processing information…<\/p>\n

We watched as Happy complied with Michelle\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

The historian Fay Bound Alberti has studied loneliness, and she makes a distinction between negative solitude and what was once understood as \u201coneliness.\u201d Negative solitude, or loneliness, is painful. Oneliness is just a physical state \u2014 the condition of being by yourself. Here we face the question of whether Happy is experiencing loneliness or merely oneliness…<\/p>\n

The position of the Nonhuman Rights Project is that Happy is stuck in a kind of elephant Guant\u00e1namo and every day spent there is a crime against her being. In the past year, we\u2019ve 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\u2019s suffering when we can\u2019t even measure our own? SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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