December 10, 2025—Pittsburgh, PA—The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) has filed a habeas corpus petition in Somerset County, demanding the right to liberty of two elephants recently moved to the Pittsburgh Zoo’s breeding facility in Fairhope.
In an October hearing before an Allegheny County judge, the NhRP sought injunctive relief to prevent the zoo from transferring sisters Victoria and Zuri to its International Conservation Center (ICC) pending the outcome of the lawsuit the NhRP filed in October on behalf of Victoria, Zuri, Angeline, Savanna, and Tasha. During the hearing, lawyers for the zoo announced Victoria and Zuri had already been moved, which took them out of the jurisdiction of the initial lawsuit.
With the support of elephant cognition and behavior experts, the NhRP is asking the Court of Common Pleas to issue “an order to show cause,” which would require the Pittsburgh Zoo to justify its imprisonment of elephants Victoria and Zuri in a habeas corpus hearing. The NhRP is asking for the same order in its ongoing lawsuit on behalf of Angeline, Savanna, and Tasha. Courts in New York have already issued this habeas corpus order on behalf of an elephant and two chimpanzees. Ultimately, the NhRP is urging the Pennsylvania courts to either release the elephants to a sanctuary or consider them as candidates for rewilding.
The NhRP’s petition details the Pittsburgh Zoo and the ICC’s forced and unnatural breeding process, including restraining elephants, forcibly separating mothers from their calves shortly after birth, and forcibly separating bonded elephants. For example, in May of 2017, a female calf born at the ICC “was removed from her mother shortly after birth because the mother was apparently not lactating or caring for the calf, which is a common pathology among captive elephants that contributes to low calf survival rates. The calf was ultimately raised by keepers at the Pittsburgh Zoo for three months until the calf was euthanized due to a reported failure to thrive.”
In addition, while the ICC’s website implies the elephants have access to “1,000 acres of rolling hills,” the evidence included with the lawsuit suggests “Victoria and Zuri will spend most of their lives confined within the ICC’s elephant barns—structures composed of steel beams, insulated metal siding, cement-block interior walls, and concrete-filled pipe bollards that divide the stalls.”
The expert declarations submitted in support of the NhRP’s lawsuits testify to the elephants’ suffering and their deep physical and psychological need for freedom of choice and movement. Recent social media posts about the history of captive breeding by the zoo, including footage of Angeline being dragged away from her mother Savanna, whose leg is chained, and Zuri being separated from her mother by a handler with a bullhook, have sparked widespread outrage.
The NhRP is the only civil rights organization in the US dedicated solely to securing rights for nonhuman animals. Writing in The Atlantic, historian Jill Lepore called the NhRP’s litigation to free Happy the elephant from the Bronx Zoo to a sanctuary “the most important animal-rights case of the 21st century.” That litigation concluded in New York’s highest court in 2022, with Judges Rowan Wilson and Jenny Rivera issuing landmark dissenting opinions in favor of recognizing the availability of habeas corpus to certain nonhuman animals.
The court had a duty to “to recognize Happy’s right to petition for her liberty not just because she is a wild animal who is not meant to be caged and displayed, but because the rights we confer on others define who we are as a society,” Judge Wilson wrote. Both Happy’s case and the Pittsburgh elephants’ case draw on fundamental principles of justice, liberty, and equality, centuries of case law, and the science of elephant cognition and behavior.
- Access the NhRP’s media kit, including court filings in both lawsuits and photos and videos of the elephants for use in media coverage (credit Molly Condit).
- Visit the elephants’ client page including the elephants’ biographies and information about the exhibit and the ICC
- In early 2025, a Pittsburgh-based national animal advocacy group called the Christian Animal Rights Association created a Change.org petition urging the director of the Pittsburgh Zoo to release the elephants to a sanctuary. It currently has over 14,000 signatures.
The Pittsburgh Zoo has been included on In Defense of Animals’ list of “10 Worst Zoos for Elephants in North America” in 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2020.