ONE CHILLY MORNING last October, I took a monorail through New York City’s Bronx Zoo in hopes of catching a glimpse of a famous elephant named Happy. When we finally spied her backside tucked in the far corner of the open-air exhibit, our guide begged us to remain in our seats as she shared Happy’s impressive stats: She weighed approximately 10,000 pounds, ate more than 200 pounds of hay, and drank more than 60 gallons of water a day.
The guide didn’t mention another interesting fact about Happy: In 2022, she became the first elephant to have habeas corpus hearings, a legal vehicle historically used to challenge a person’s unlawful imprisonment by the state. The case, which was brought
