Elephants will be allowed to remain at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo following Colorado Supreme Court ruling

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Elephants will be allowed to remain at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo following Colorado Supreme Court ruling

Elephants allowed to remain at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo following Colorado Supreme Court ruling

Elephants allowed to remain at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo following Colorado Supreme Court ruling

01:31

Colorado’s highest court has ruled in favor of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo after it was sued by an animal rights group over the alleged treatment of elephants at the Colorado Springs facility.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the elephants couldn’t be released because the law cited in the lawsuit only applies to humans. The Nonhuman Rights Project filed the suit in May of last year in Colorado Springs and said that the animals were being held against their will in a way that was causing them stress, physical issues, and brain damage.

The group argued that in the wild, elephants have a range of up to several thousand miles, while at the zoo, they can only move about 100 yards in any direction.

An elephant paces in an outdoor enclosure at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.

Molly Condit

An attorney for the zoo told CBS News Colorado that it takes care of the elephants and meets their needs.

The lawsuit cited habeas corpus, a provision of the U.S. Constitution that lays out requirements for the detention and jailing of people and offers remedies for getting people released from custody. The Colorado Supreme Court, in its decision, said that habeas corpus can’t be cited to release animals from zoos and that the lower court’s ruling will hold.

The justices ruled 6-0 with one justice not voting.

“We conclude that the district court correctly held that Colorado’s habeas statute only applies to persons, and not to nonhuman animals, no matter how cognitively, psychologically, or socially sophisticated they may be,” State Supreme Court Justice Maria Berkenkotter wrote in

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The zoo called the lawsuit “frivolous” in

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, saying “while we’re happy with this outcome, we are disappointed that it ever came to this.”

“For the past 19 months, we’ve been subjected to their misrepresented attacks, and we’ve wasted valuable time and money responding to them in courts and in the court of public opinion,” the zoo’s statement continued.

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Effie Siverts / Getty Images

The Nonhuman Rights Project expressed disappointment and hinted at the possibility of an attempt to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying Tuesday’s ruling “perpetuates a clear injustice, stating that unless an individual is human they have no right to liberty.”

The group said the zoo’s five elephants will continue to suffer unless and until a court steps in.

“Future courts will reject this notion, as judges in the United States and around the world have already begun to do,”

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 continued. “As with other social justice movements, early losses are expected as we challenge an entrenched status quo that has allowed Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou, and Jambo to be relegated to a lifetime of mental and physical suffering. We’ll share further analysis of this opinion as well as our next steps in the coming days.”

The district court did note, however, that the elephants likely were exposed to poor conditions and inadequately sized enclosures, but said the Nonhuman Rights Project simply has no standing under the law cited in its lawsuit.

“The district court granted the Zoo’s motion to dismiss,” Berkenkotter wrote in her ruling. “As required in ruling on a motion to dismiss, the court accepted the allegations in NRP’s Petition as true, including its assertion that elephants cannot function normally in captivity. Addressing NRP’s argument that the common law has historically been used to extend the writ of habeas corpus, the court noted that no U.S. court has extended the right to nonhuman animals and, regardless, that the right to habeas corpus in Colorado is a creature of statute.”

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Austen Erblat

Austen Erblat is a digital producer and assignment editor at CBS News Colorado and is Covering Colorado First. Originally from South Florida, he’s been working as a journalist in Denver since 2022.

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