Opinion | Would Google’s LaMDA say Happy the elephant is a person?
- The recent court case centring on an elephant in a New York zoo shows the difficulty facing those pushing to have animals recognised as legal people with rights
- There seems to be more interest in whether artificial intelligence should be given rights once it passes the threshold of sentience
The elephant, named Happy, was taken from the wild in Thailand when she was a year old and held in captivity for over 40 years in a two-acre (0.8 hectare) enclosure, which is a tiny living space for an elephant. In contrast to the Bronx Zoo’s announcement that it would end their elephant exhibit if they had only one elephant left, it kept Happy living alone for the last 16 years.
This court case could have caused an overdue shift in the relationship between human animals and non-human animals. This elephant would no longer be a thing but a legal person with rights.
The common law concept of habeas corpus – which in Latin means “you have the body” – has been used to let a court decide whether a person was lawfully imprisoned. It was used innovatively in 1772, when Lord Mansfield accepted the use of habeas corpus to free James Somerset, an enslaved person, marking a watershed moment in the abolition of slavery.
