Victoria understands. She knows her sister’s footsteps before she sees her, reading Zuri’s approach through the ground itself, the way elephants have read each other for millions of years. When they meet, trunk finds trunk, tips curling together in a greeting that’s been passed down long before anything resembling a human society existed to decide whether the gesture means anything. It’s not projection to call this recognition, memory, affection. Elephants pass the mirror test. They stand vigil over their dead. Mother elephants who lose a calf refuse to leave the infant body for days, roaring at anything that comes near it. Elephants are not blank, they are not simple – they are cognitively and emotionally whole, and the fact that we consider them “property” says a great deal more about us than them.
Elephants are keystone engineers of the ecosystems they inhabit – digging waterholes in dry riverbeds that sustain birds and big cats through droughts, dispersing the seeds that regenerate entire forests, opening canopies that let grassland survive alongside woodland. They communicate through infrasound rumbles pitched below the range of human hearing, detected through specialised receptors in their feet and trunks from more than five miles away, and read the health, identity, and reproductive status of a distant relative on the wind.
Their societies are matriarchal, led by the oldest female, who carries in her memory the location of water sources across droughts that span decades, while sisters, aunts, and grandmothers share the work of raising every calf. And they are old, with their lineage stretching back 60 million years, with the family that includes modern elephants existing for four million years. Homo sapiens, by comparison, have been around for roughly 300,000 years – a mere rounding error in the timeline of the species we’ve spent our brief tenure caging, dominating, breeding by force, and killing.
It’s worth sitting with the arithmetic. A species that is just a few hundred thousand years old, describes a lineage that is tens of millions of years old as simple and simplistic – one that engineers ecosystems and grieves its dead and remembers water sources across a human lifetime. Operating from this erroneous conclusion, humans have gone on to subjugate and control today’s descendants of this lineage by reducing them to mere property status. If ignorance is the kinder explanation for this reductionist labelling, arrogance is the more honest one. Either way, it’s difficult to look at the numbers and conclude that the humans in this story are the sophisticated party.
And yet here we are, the junior species, barely out of our evolutionary nappies, standing over the elder species with a chain in one hand and a made-up legal classification in the other, insisting, with a straight face, that elephants only exist as our property. We are delusionary and deranged.
What we Actually do to Them, Said Plainly
Here is the part usually laundered by euphemism, so let’s not launder it any longer. Victoria and Zuri – two of five African elephants, alongside Angeline, Savanna, and Tasha, who spent years together at the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium – were shipped to a breeding facility to have their bodies used for reproduction on a schedule set by people who will never ask their permission and are not required to.
What happens at the facility isn’t normal. Elephants as young as eight are restrained and forcibly inseminated. For chilling context, in their natural habitat African elephants usually give birth to their first calf around 14, Asian elephants at a little over 15 years old. Stripped of its euphemism, what frequently happens in zoos is child rape. The perverse experience involves a human arm entering the elephant’s reproductive tract, often while the elephant is boxed in by metal bars so she cannot move. The degrading, mentally distressing, physically violent process is repeated several times as failure rates are common. A mother’s most intimate and natural act soiled by humans with alarming regularity.
This is reproductive coercion, industrialised and permitted by statute, dressed up in the vocabulary of conservation and family entertainment. Nobody would accept this description applied to a human being. The only reason this perversity survives is the victim doesn’t have the word ‘person’ attached to her name – and an entire apparatus of accreditation bodies, breeding consortiums, and deceitful marketing, has been built on the fact she doesn’t.
A Writ Eight Hundred Years Old, Aimed Somewhere New
In October 2025, lawyers for the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus with the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas. The phrase is Latin for “you have the body,” and is one of the oldest instruments in common law. It is built for exactly one blunt question – is detention of a subject lawful, and if not, will you order the body released?
The lawyer who filed it, and who has become the sharpest and most persistent voice pushing the Pittsburgh case forward, is Jake Davis, a senior staff attorney with the Nonhuman Rights Project. Davis is lead counsel on the organisation’s Pittsburgh litigation, as well as its parallel fight on behalf of elephants held in Hawaiʻi, which makes him one of only a handful of people in the country standing in actual courtrooms arguing, on the record, that an elephant is someone rather than something.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century abolitionists used the same writ to challenge the confinement of enslaved human beings, on the theory that unlawful confinement doesn’t stop being unlawful just because the person confining you insists it’s standard practice. Davis and the NhRP’s argument runs on the same axle – habeas corpus was never written to apply only to humans. It was written for any being capable of suffering wrongful confinement, and an elephant who is self-aware, socially complex, and carrying a working sense of past and future, suffers that confinement in a way the law ought to recognise, if the law were being honest with itself.
Five Elephants, not a Mascot for an Idea
It’s tempting, writing about a legal strategy, to let the animals blur into a single symbolic elephant standing in for the argument. Victoria, Zuri, Angeline, Savanna, and Tasha are not that, and reducing them to that would be its own small act of the same erasure which this whole case is fighting against.
Savanna and Tasha are the oldest of the five, taken from the wild as calves more than forty years ago, pulled, in all likelihood, from mothers who fought to keep them, at a time when almost nobody in the industry doing the pulling thought to ask whether that was defensible.
Angeline, born in 2008, has never known anything else – there’s no ‘before’ for her to remember, no wild she was stolen out of, only a life that started inside a fence.
Victoria was born at the Pittsburgh Zoo in 1999, bred deliberately for her genetics and her exhibit value, she was separated from her mother when she was an adolescent – a bond that should have lasted a lifetime ruptured. Victoria has eight siblings alive today, scattered across four states, most of them strangers.
Zuri was taken from her mother at six – another bond broken in the years of childhood.
What they built, over the years, was an improvised, mismatched, differently-wounded version of the multi-generational family they were supposed to have and were denied. In October 2025, a human institution split their improvised family down the middle, with a truck and a transfer order. Victoria and Zuri went to Somerset County. Angeline, Savanna, and Tasha stayed behind, on the other side of a jurisdictional line that exists only outside of an elephant’s mind.
What “Person” Actually Means, and Why the Goalposts Keep Moving
The word doing all the real work in this case isn’t elephant. It’s person – and it’s worth being precise about what that word is, because it was never the biological category most people assume it is. Legal personhood is an invention, a status lawmakers hand out to decide who gets to hold and exercise rights, and the line has moved before.
Corporations are legal persons, entitled to sue, be sued, and in some contexts exercise something resembling the right to free speech. Enslaved human beings, for generations, were not legal persons under American law, despite being unmistakably, undeniably human – the plainest possible proof that this category has never been drawn by biology, only by whoever currently benefits from where the line sits.
That inconsistency is worth meditating on because it’s not a footnote to this story. It’s the whole story. A species that will grant personhood to a corporation, a legal fiction with no nervous system, no capacity for grief, no ability to suffer anything at all, while denying it to a being that mourns its dead and recognises itself in a mirror, is not applying a coherent moral or scientific standard. It’s applying whichever standard currently protects the arrangement it likes. That isn’t law responding to settled truth. It’s law responding to leverage – and elephants, chained and voiceless in a courtroom, have none.
Davis has spent his career arguing against exactly that kind of leverage-dressed-as-principle. What’s happened to Victoria and Zuri, in his telling, isn’t an unfortunate accident of an otherwise sensible system. It’s precisely what the system is built to permit once you’ve excluded a being from the category of personhood. “They have no rights, no legal rights in this process,” he said, describing what the law currently allows, “because what’s unfolding in the eyes of the law is legal.” An elephant can be chained, artificially inseminated against her will, and separated from a calf she’ll likely never see raised, and none of it legally amounts to anything at all. “There’s no recourse” concluded Davis.
He describes the four-decade arc of these cases as a slow bend rather than a straight line. “A number of small individuals” he called the lawyers and litigants who keep filing petitions, trying to bend our arc of morality in the right direction. It’s how every slow-moving legal reversal in history has actually happened, one uncomfortable dissent at a time, until the discomfort outweighs the convenience.
Gangster Logic
Here is the plainest way to say what’s actually going on. Humans are running an extortion scheme on the rest of the living world – take what you want, from whoever can’t stop you, and if anyone objects, fabricate a document making the extortion legal, even necessary. Capitalism and its close relative colonialism supply the operating logic – the three E’s of exploitation, extraction, and exclusion. Bodies, land, labour, entire species, treated as raw material to be taken from, while simultaneously placed outside the circle of beings whose pain is allowed to count. That’s the shakedown. And the absence of personhood is the legal loophole designed to make extortion somehow permissible.
Confinement becomes a property right. Reproductive coercion becomes a breeding programme with a newsletter and a naming contest for the calf. The separation of a mother from her adolescent daughter becomes a line item on a transfer plan. None of this requires a single moustache-twirling villain, and that’s precisely the point. The villainy has already been laundered into policy, accreditation standards, popular culture and most importantly, the law. Once exploitation is written into the code, nobody has to feel like a gangster to run the racket. Any sense of wrongdoing is magicked away.
And the fact that the boundary of who counts keeps changing shape – expanding to include corporations when it’s profitable, contracting to exclude elephants when it’s convenient – isn’t evidence of humans carefully refining our moral reasoning over centuries. It’s evidence of the opposite – our dishonest, self-serving, primitive thinking about who deserves consideration and who will be exploited. We didn’t reason our way to excluding elephants from personhood. We built an economy that needed them excluded, so we created a dishonest narrative and then attempted to legitimise it using the law. But Davis is onto the sleight of hand.
The Corruption Underneath the Corruption
All of this raises the harder question the Pittsburgh Zoo case is asking – is there something inherently twisted about how we live, if how we live requires this much pain, trauma, and death of others? It’s worth remembering that the line between us and them was never handed down by nature. Humans are animals. Mammals, primates, vertebrates, built from the same evolutionary material, running the same basic nervous-system architecture that lets an elephant register pain, hold a trauma, and grieve a death. The distinction the law insists on – person here, property there – is a fiction we authored.
Undoing it is never going to be a matter of simply feeling more empathy. It’s a matter of what a culture, and the economic and legal systems underneath it, have decided is worth protecting. Historically, that decision has never been left purely to voluntary good will, it must be re-coded, statute by statute, to counter the code that built the cages in the first place. And that is Davis’ work today, the day after, and the day after that.
Victoria, 26, and Zuri, 17, don’t know any of this is happening in a courtroom a few miles from where they used to live with Angeline, Savanna, and Tasha. Victoria and Zuri know each other – the footsteps, the trunk against trunk, the particular rhythm of a bond that neither the zoo nor the court has yet found the honesty to acknowledge exists, and has existed for longer than the human legal system that seeks to deny its reality.
Baby elephants greet each other by linking trunks.
Footnote:
This article draws on an interview with Jake Davis, senior staff attorney for the Nonhuman Rights Project, on a case report on the Pittsburgh Zoo litigation, and on public reporting and research from the Nonhuman Rights Project, Free to Be Elephants, In Defence of Animals, ElephantVoices, and the AMA Journal of Ethics.
Next week, Davis and the Nonhuman Rights Project will file their opening brief with the Pennsylvania Superior Court in the case against the Pittsburgh Zoo.
Davis is also awaiting a scheduling order from the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court, which will set a date for oral arguments.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
