“Nothing is wrong with Happy.”

The statement the Bronx Zoo issued on July 31 was undeniably prickly. By then, Happy, its 50-plus-year-old female Asian elephant, had not been seen by visitors in her outdoor enclosure in two weeks, and people were starting to notice.

“Yo I’m hearing that Happy the Elephant from the Bronx Zoo HAS BEEN MISSING FOR OVER A MONTH!?!?” one X user posted in September. “Y’all heard about this!?!?”

Typically, Happy is the main attraction on the monorail ride through the Wild Asia exhibit. She is also a kind of ideological legal figurehead: A case went all the way up to the New York Court of Appeals to decide whether she, and therefore all elephants, had free will and whether her confinement in a zoo was a violation of habeas corpus. Her legal battle ended in 2022, unsuccessfully, with the court ruling, in part, that habeas corpus applies only to humans.

It was the end of years of awkward press for the Bronx Zoo, one of New York City’s most treasured cultural institutions, and a worldwide leader in elephant conservation. And now, not even two years later, it faces new questions from the same corners about the elephant’s well-being.

It has been over two months, and still no Happy.

The zoo insists her absence from the exhibit is by choice — Happy doesn’t want to budge from her cozy barn with its food and treats, even as pressure has built from a public eager to see her. And in fact, Happy recently passed a government health check — demanded by the same animal rights activists who had put forward her court case.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service released a one-sentence report on the state of the elephant: “No noncompliant items identified during this inspection.” Happy, in other words, was fine.