Friends of Animals applauds the NYC Bar Association for urging city officials to send Happy and Patty, the Bronx Zoo’s last two elephants, to sanctuaries where they can finally experience the dignity and space they deserve. For nearly 50 years, these intelligent, social animals have been denied the freedom they need to thrive. The public has long voiced concerns about their confinement and welfare, and now legal experts are making it clear that the city has both the authority and responsibility to act.

“New Yorkers, whose tax money supports these budgets and who care deeply about the physical and psychological well-being of zoo animals, deserve to know that there is adequate oversight by the City of its funding and the zoo fund-recipient, and that the animals under the zoo’s care enjoy robust physical and psychological health,” the letter reads.

Macarena Montes, an attorney and animal rights scholar at Harvard University, told Gothamist that resistance to transferring elephants to animal sanctuaries is often tied to the financial incentives zoos have for keeping them.

“Zoos are an industry that profits on the exhibition of animals, they profit on entertainment,” she said. “Zoos have a very well-known discourse that their activity promotes conservation and education, but the reality is that it’s entertainment.”

The evidence is abundantly clear: Captivity is physically and emotionally damaging to elephants, and zoos worldwide are under pressure to phase out elephant exhibits. Since 1991, dozens of U.S. zoos have shut down their elephant enclosures. Yet the Bronx  Zoo clings to the past, confining Happy and Patty in a much too small exhibit. 

Elephants are highly intelligent, self-aware, and deeply social. In the wild, they travel up to 50 miles a day, learning, playing, and mourning lost family members. In captivity, it’s a completely different story. Stripped of their freedom, elephants suffer from depression, anxiety, disease, and shortened life spans to remain tourist attractions, although there’s a wonderful elephant sanctuary in Tennessee. That’s a crying shame, Friends of Animals says.