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Photo: Billy and Tina confined in the Tulsa Zoo, courtesy of Elephant Guardians of Los Angeles
On a Friday in May earlier this year I stood at the filing window in the Los Angeles Superior Court with Courtney Fern, our Director of Government Relations. We had a habeas corpus petition in hand. The clerk at the civil division looked at our papers and said they couldn’t accept them. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but there was quite a bit of back and forth. We had a rule-complying habeas petition from two individuals seeking emergency protection from the court. But the clerk wouldn’t accept it because habeas cases go to the criminal division. I explained that our plaintiffs didn’t commit a crime but I followed the clerk’s instruction nonetheless. Courtney and I began our journey across downtown LA to the criminal division.
The petition explained why Billy and Tina needed the court’s help. Billy had spent nearly four decades in the Los Angeles Zoo’s three-acre exhibit, much of it alone. The zoo repeatedly subjected him to invasive semen collection procedures involving physical restraint and forced penetration. Both elephants displayed repetitive behaviors indicative of chronic psychological distress. The zoo had recently announced plans to transfer them to the Tulsa Zoo where their exploitation and suffering would continue—Billy was being sent there to attempt more of the same invasive procedures that were unsuccessful at the LA Zoo.
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Courtney and I dragged boxes of documents across the city to the criminal courthouse. After 30 minutes in line, a clerk called someone for help. I overheard: “They’re not at a prison; they’re being held at the zoo.” That moment captured something deeper than administrative confusion. The system had categories for human prisoners and human civil litigants. It had no category for nonhuman animals suffering in unjust captivity. The criminal division rejected the petition. We tried to get before a judge directly. That failed. Back to civil. Electronic filing. Rejected. Six rejections over five days while the zoo prepared to move Billy and Tina out of state. In the meantime, we were preparing a writ of mandamus—a lawsuit against the court itself for refusing to accept the elephants’ petition. On the fifth day of this odyssey, LA attorney (and friend of the elephants and the NhRP) Matthew Strugar began his own quest to help get it filed. He navigated a maze of corridors and conversations at the courthouse where he obtained an audience with the presiding judge of the criminal division whom he persuaded to accept and assign the petition. The same day it was filed, we learned the LA Zoo had secretly loaded Billy and Tina onto trucks and driven them to Oklahoma in the cover of night. By the time their petition reached a judge, they were already gone.
The physical barriers we faced, standing at that window, being told no category existed for our filing, running between divisions, were a manifestation of a problem that has defined animals’ relationship to the legal system for as long as that system has existed. The courts operate as though animals’ interests do not matter. A wall separates humans from all other animals in the eyes of the law. Access to justice is the gateway through a part of that wall: recognition that they can suffer legal injuries at all. That gateway was closed to Billy and Tina. The civil-criminal ping-pong we experienced was a symptom of this deeper exclusion: a system that never contemplated that animals could suffer legal injuries has no explicit procedures for receiving their legal claims of injury.
When we talk about animals being on the other side of a legal wall, the filing window is a key aspect of what it looks like. Courts have dismissed habeas petitions on behalf of nonhuman clients not on the merits (the substance of the arguments) but because judges in those cases said they couldn’t even consider such a case on behalf of a nonhuman animal. The Colorado Supreme Court put this injustice starkly when it said that it could not hear a habeas case on behalf of a nonhuman being “no matter how cognitively, psychologically, or socially sophisticated they may be.”
A well-known maxim in the legal community is that there can be no right without a remedy. At the Nonhuman Rights Project we talk a lot about rights that nonhuman animals deserve—like the right to liberty. Supporting that right is the ability for someone to go to court on an animal’s behalf to ask that the right be recognized and remedied in the first place. This involves legal concepts like standing, the right of action, and the ability to be represented through an advocate. The ability to enforce legal protections is what distinguishes meaningful rights from paper promises. The bureaucratic absurdity we experienced in LA plays out everywhere animals suffer and are deprived of their rights—even when the law is clearly established and on the books. Billy and Tina lost their chance at a hearing in part because no category existed for their petition: for nonhuman beings who committed no crime yet are held captive and suffering.
Without access to justice there is no justice.
My own path to the Nonhuman Rights Project as a lawyer came through years of animal protection litigation where I watched as case after case was lost on procedural grounds. Human advocates often lacked standing to protect animals from egregious legal violations because the humans were not injured, so the cases were dismissed without reaching a decision on the legal violation. My experience working within the legal system for nearly 15 years convinced me that animals need their own legal status, their own standing, their own rights. Legal wrongs committed against nonhuman animals are not wrong only if they hurt humans—they are wrong because they hurt animals.
This past year, the NhRP opened up a new and ongoing area of research: how to tackle the systemic barriers, often procedural in nature, that categorically deny nonhuman animals access to the justice system. This research resulted in a 113-page memo exploring 17 options to promote access to justice for nonhuman animals. We’ll be incorporating the best of these ideas into our work in 2026 and beyond and will share more details as soon as we can. We’ll also be launching a new grassroots campaign to free Billy and Tina.
At the NhRP, we refuse to accept a legal status quo that keeps animals caged and chained, tears them from their families for display, treats their bodies as objects to be used, and sees them as mere property. If you can, please donate today [[link removed]] to help animals like Billy and Tina gain access to justice and regain their freedom.
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Thank you,
Christopher Berry
Executive Director, the NhRP
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