“Nothing is wrong with Happy.”
The statement the Bronx Zoo issued on July 31 was undeniably prickly. By then, Happy, its 50-plus-year-old female Asian elephant, had not been seen by visitors in her outdoor enclosure in two weeks, and people were starting to notice.
“Yo I’m hearing that Happy the Elephant from the Bronx Zoo HAS BEEN MISSING FOR OVER A MONTH!?!?” one X user posted in September. “Y’all heard about this!?!?”
Typically, Happy is the main attraction on the monorail ride through the Wild Asia exhibit. She is also a kind of ideological legal figurehead: A case went all the way up to the New York Court of Appeals to decide whether she, and therefore all elephants, had free will and whether her confinement in a zoo was a violation of habeas corpus. Her legal battle ended in 2022, unsuccessfully, with the court ruling, in part, that habeas corpus applies only to humans.
It was the end of years of awkward press for the Bronx Zoo, one of New York City’s most treasured cultural institutions, and a worldwide leader in elephant conservation. And now, not even two years later, it faces new questions from the same corners about the elephant’s well-being.
It has been over two months, and still no Happy.
The zoo insists her absence from the exhibit is by choice — Happy doesn’t want to budge from her cozy barn with its food and treats, even as pressure has built from a public eager to see her. And in fact, Happy recently passed a government health check — demanded by the same animal rights activists who had put forward her court case.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service released a one-sentence report on the state of the elephant: “No noncompliant items identified during this inspection.” Happy, in other words, was fine.
This has done little to mollify the activists, who insist that her isolation bolsters the point they made before the courts: that the day-to-day existence of the elephant, a member of a highly social species who has lived apart for decades, means that Happy cannot possibly be happy. Her withdrawal, they say, proves this.
As the monorail slides above the 43 acres of the Wild Asia enclosure, passengers face one direction: out over the herds of buffalo-like gaur and tufted deer. But if they turn around as it skims past the wallow of a greater one-horned rhino and her calf to peer between the cars, they may glimpse a compound of animal barns.
The zoo’s two elephants, Happy and Patty, rest in barns at night. They have been kept apart ever since a herd dust-up injured another elephant so badly it had to be euthanized. Other companions have passed away, and since 2006, Happy has been kept on her own. Though there is always a barrier between the two remaining elephants, they can touch each other over and through it.
“Happy has recently opted not to be in the exhibit during the day, but she has gone into that area in the morning before the zoo opens,” the zoo said in September. “Happy is choosing to spend her time near the barn interacting with staff rather than in the exhibit space. She is given access to the exhibit area each day but not choosing to spend her time there.”
She has still not been seen by the public since July.
Happy’s story began in the 1970s, when she and a group of six other elephant calves were captured, most likely in Thailand, and sold for about $800 a head to a California safari park. The orphans were named after the seven dwarfs, and over the years dispersed to zoos and circuses. Happy and Grumpy ended up together at the Bronx Zoo in 1977, where they lived peacefully until disaster struck: The zoo’s two other elephants at the time attacked and injured Grumpy, who had to be euthanized in 2002. The animals were separated into pairs for safety, but Happy’s next companion died in 2006.
She has been on her own ever since.
Her plight has long pained animal rights activists, and after years of petitions, lawsuits and mayoral studies on zoo conditions, the Bronx Zoo decided in 2006 to phase out its elephant program; Happy and Patty will be the last elephants there. But elephants have an average life span of 65 years, and Happy and Patty are still in their 50s.
Happy’s disappearance this summer alarmed Courtney Fern, a director at the Nonhuman Rights Project, and her team began scouring social media looking for posts about the animal on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. They found none, she said. So they started sending volunteers to ride the monorail to look for her. Only Patty — identifiable by her signature move of throwing strands of hay on her back — was ever in the pasture.
In July, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a complaint with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, which sent an officer to the Bronx on Aug. 8 to inspect the animal. Around that time, Mary Dixon, the zoo’s longtime spokeswoman, issued a statement: “Happy is given the opportunity each day to use the exhibit area, and when she chooses to do so will once again be seen by visitors.”
The zoo declined a request for a New York Times reporter to observe Happy in her barn or before zoo hours, when she might leave her stable. Ms. Dixon told The Times that the APHIS inspection had entailed an examination of both elephants, as well as their barns and enclosures. The zoo’s own veterinarians, she said, also examined Happy and determined that she “appears fine and to be doing well.” The barn door remains open, Ms. Dixon added.
Many elephant activists and concerned fans are unsatisfied. Ms. Fern has demanded photos, elephant-keeper logs and veterinary records from James J. Breheny, the director of the Bronx Zoo, to which she said she had received no response. But in an interview, Ms. Fern admitted that no amount of data could shift her group’s belief that a zoo was no place for an elephant.
“Ultimately,” Ms. Fern said, “we don’t think that elephants should be held captive.”
Despite the APHIS report and the zoo’s reassurances, the change in behavior is unusual enough that elephant experts have their doubts that nothing is wrong with Happy.
Caitlin O’Connell, an elephant scientist and instructor at Harvard, said that elephants require social interaction to thrive, and as migratory animals, they enjoy large spaces over which to forage and graze. Female Asian elephants can cover hundreds of square miles of territory. Dr. O’Connell said she understood the value in exhibiting animals to people who would never otherwise encounter them, to get “them interested in wildlife and the wonder.” She added, “But the answer may be that it’s not right for you to be able to see the whole wide world in your backyard.”
The zoo community strongly rejects some activists’ blanket stance that captivity — a word that is increasingly taboo among zookeepers, who describe their animals as “in human care” — is intrinsically bad. They point to the extensive conservation work done by zoos, particularly the Bronx Zoo.
“You think elephants walk dozens or more miles away because they want to?” asked Dan Ashe, the president and chief executive of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, an industry organization. “They move because they have to — they have to find water, to find food and they have to avoid predators.” Fed well and cared for in a zoo environment, he said, many prefer to stay put.
“Our members manage all forms of animals, from largest to smallest, and they are dedicated to constantly improving the care and the well-being of those animals,” Mr. Ashe said.
What has most changed over Happy’s lifetime are zoos themselves. Even as the complaints rise again in New York, the fact is that zoos have learned from the mistakes of the past. That includes the Bronx Zoo: In the 1980s, Happy played games of tug of war with local college sports teams; she was compelled to do tricks and give rides.
“We have learned how to care for them better, how to meet their needs and how to manage them from a physical standpoint, and from a psychological and a social standpoint,” Mr. Ashe said.
At the Al Ain Zoo in the United Arab Emirates, for example, keepers slip in at night and change the elephants’ environment so the animals wake up to a new experience every day, said Gerry Creighton, a freelance elephant keeper who designed the exhibit and travels the world advising zoos. Electronic timers scatter their feed or randomly hoist it up into the trees; similarly shaking things up for Happy, he said, could combat a case of elephant ennui — if that’s what’s going on.
“We broke away from the shackle of the past and said we need to design with the elephants’ psychology in mind,” said Mr. Creighton, who began his career at the Dublin Zoo decades go, where he wrangled elephants with metal hooks — a past for which he said he now feels shame.
“I am very pro-zoo with elephants,” he said from Dublin. “What I am seeing as my own process has evolved, and my own empathy and my own understanding, is that the zoo as an industry, as a profession, has to really shake itself to its foundations and look at how we are looking after animals.”
In the Bronx, Happy remains in her barn.
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