About 500 O‘ahu students packed into an auditorium Monday to hear a debate about whether elephants have human rights.
The Hawai‘i Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case revolving around the treatement of Mari and Vaigai, two elephants kept at the Honolulu Zoo. But instead of meeting at Ali‘iōlani Hale, students from 11 O‘ahu schools gathered at Punahou School to attend the hearing as part of the state Judiciary’s Courts in the Community educational outreach program.
The case could set a landmark precedent for animal rights, advocates said Monday.
“I think we’ll look back on this case as a time when history began to shift,” Brodie Hurtado, communications director for plaintiff Nonhuman Rights Project Inc., told Aloha State Daily.
The case revolves around whether the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus — the process by which a court must determine whether someone’s imprisonment is lawful — applies to Mari and Vaigai, wild-born elephants that have been held in captivity for more than 30 years each.
Jake Davis, attorney for NhRP emphasized that habeas corpus is handled in a case-by-case basis, and that the Supreme Court’s verdict does not necessarily mean all animals or all elephants in captivity must be freed. Instead, ruling in favor of the elephants simply allows their advocates to plead in a future hearing that the animals’ rights to bodily autonomy are being violated.
“The world’s foremost elephant scientists have established that Mari and Vaigai are autonomous,” Davis said. “Autonomy is the foundation of the right to liberty. Habeas corpus exists to protect an individual’s right to liberty …We are suggesting that autonomy in this case is sufficient for the recognition of the right [to liberty].”
Nonetheless, the justices grilled Davis on the potential ramifications of extending legal personhood to animals to this extent.
“There’s a lot of animals that have autonomy,” said Associate Justice Sabrina McKenna. “Don’t octopuses have autonomy? Are you going to at least limit it to mammals? Are you talking about reptiles, amphibians, insects? … The courts could be inundated with these requests, if we were to recognize this. We would have to set some sort of reasonable parameters.”
Davis countered that elephants are a special case in the animal kingdom, as the animals are known to have high cognitive capacities allowing for self-awareness, highly complex family and social dynamics, and the species’ famously extensive memory.
On the other hand, Deputy Corporation Counsel Patricia Sendao, speaking on behalf of the City and County of Honolulu, argued that the question of whether to grant human rights to animals is the sort of sweeping change that the state Legislature should decide, rather than the courts.
“This court looks backwards towards historical precedent for grounding and then, if necessary, will take incremental steps forward,” Sendao said, comparing the evolution of the law to the slow development of a coral reef. “But what is asked for here by NhRP is … a sweeping pronouncement that fundamentally alters our laws regarding animal welfare.”
While Davis argued that granting two elephants the right to appear at a single evidentiary hearing is “about as incremental … as can be had under the common law,” the justices also pushed back against the court’s supposed impotence. McKenna invoked the case of Rusty the orangutan, who was brought to Honolulu Zoo in 1997 after being held in a too-small enclosure in a New Jersey zoo.
“Are we to wait … if we had a situation like that?” McKenna asked. “You’re saying this court would be powerless, or the judiciary would be powerless to act even in that situation.”
Meanwhile, Associate Justice Todd Eddins briefly derailed the proceedings by invoking the 1960s cartoon “The Flintstones,” specifically the alien character The Great Gazoo.
“The Great Gazoo was an alien,” Eddins said, to laughs from the audience. “Let’s say there was an alien. An alien’s family came down … and they were confined. Would that alien ever be able to get out of confinement, just because we have restricted [habeas corpus] to persons?”
Sendao asserted that any such alien, not being a human, would not be entitled to habeas relief, and the court should not be able to determine otherwise.
“Would one habeas petition debated between two parties be the proper forum to decide how we interact with our new alien species, a new cognitive species brought to our planet for the first time?” Sendao said. “I would say no, we wouldn’t want that to be debated with one petition … We would want to the people of Hawai‘i to opine on a fundamental, monumental shift in our relationship to [living beings] in this universe.”
Aliens notwithstanding, the court took no action Monday and will deliver a verdict at an undetermined future date.
Punahou School senior Sofia Pomares Sotomayor said she thought the case was “fascinating” in part because of how freely and rapidly the attorneys and justices invoked not only disparate case laws and legal precedents, but also popular culture to make their points.
As part of the Courts in the Community program, attorneys visited Punahou and other schools to discuss the case ahead of time, with Pomares Sotomayor participating in a mock trial with her classmates prior to the hearing. Pomares Sotomayor, who played the part of an attorney advocating for the elephants, said the experience was valuable to understand how legal arguments are deployed in a real court setting.
While Pomares Sotomayor said she wants to pursue a law career after graduation, fellow Punahou senior Aletheia Uchida said the hearing was a good learning experience even for someone not looking to attend law school.
“Learning how to express yourself and argue your point, that’s a good skill to have,” Uchida said.
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