Jill Lepore writes:

The subject of the most important animal-rights case of the 21st century was born in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Very soon after that, a tousle-haired baby, she became trapped in human history. She was captured, locked in a cage, trucked to the coast, and loaded onto a roaring 747 that soared across the Pacific until it made landfall in the United States. She spent her earliest years in Florida, not far from Disney World, before she was shipped to Texas. In 1977, when she was 5 or 6, more men hauled her onto another truck and shipped her to New York, to a spot about four miles north of Yankee Stadium: the Bronx Zoo. In the wild, barely weaned, she’d have been living with her family—her sisters, her cousins, her aunts, and her mother—touching and nuzzling and rubbing and smelling and calling to each other almost constantly. Instead, after she landed at the zoo and for years after, she gave rides to the schoolchildren of New York and performed tricks, sometimes wearing a blue-and-black polka-dotted dress. Today, in her 50s and retired, she lives alone in a one-acre enclosure in a bleak, bamboo-shrouded Bronx Zoo exhibit called, without irony, “Wild Asia.”

This fall, on a day nearly barren of tourists, I rode through Wild Asia on a mostly empty monorail, the Bengali Express, over the Bronx River. “You’ll have no trouble spotting the next animal on our tour, the largest land mammal,” the tour guide said, dutifully reciting a script. “The lovely lady we’re meeting right here, her name is Miss Happy.” A few yards away, behind a fence of steel posts and cables enclosing a small pond, a stretch of grass, and a patch of compacted dirt—an exhibit originally named the “Khao Yai,” after Thailand’s first national park—Miss Happy stood nearly still and stared, slightly swaying, as she lifted and lowered one foot. Miss Happy has managed “to keep her wonderful figure in shape,” the guide said, as if she were describing a vain, middle-aged woman, and the zoo takes “very, very good care” of her: She receives “weekly pedicures and baths,” she said, as if this were an indulgence, the zoo a spa. The script did not mention that the pedicures are necessary to help prevent crippling and even fatal foot disease, a common consequence of captivity, since, in the wild, these animals, traveling in families, often walk many miles a day. [Continue reading…]