Hawaii’s Highest Court Could Endanger Hunting Rights

An animal rights group is asking the Hawaii Supreme Court to order the release of two elephants from the Honolulu Zoo in a case that could endanger hunting rights for gun owners.

The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) and lawyers representing the city and county of Honolulu will deliver oral arguments before Hawaii’s highest court on Nov. 9, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reported. NSSF senior vice president and general counsel Lawrence Keane noted that while this case may only involve relocating two elephants, the implications of their success could extend nationwide.

“If courts extend animal personhood theories to other species and contexts, anti-hunting activist litigants could seek to challenge established wildlife management decisions in the name of individual animal rights,” Keane wrote. “That is a risk hunters and wildlife agencies cannot afford to dismiss.”

NhRP initially filed its suit in 2023 but lost at the circuit court level before appealing to the Intermediate Court of Appeals. That court upheld the lower court’s ruling in January, stating that the animal-rights group was asking for something that couldn’t be granted.

“The word ‘person’ need not be defined; the plain meaning of the word does not include animals,” Presiding Judge Keith K. Hiraoka wrote in the opinion, noting other unsuccessful cases filed by the group.

In July, a Hawaii Supreme Court justice accused the Supreme Court of the United States of seeing “only white” in a criminal appeal over discredited forensic evidence.

“The Roberts Court sees only white,” Associate Justice Todd Eddins wrote. “It refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect.” The line appears in a 91-page opinion in Granillo v. Hawaii filed July 15. Eddins spent eight pages of it attacking the U.S. Supreme Court rather than the case before him.

In 2024, the Hawaii Supreme Court invoked the “spirit of Aloha” to uphold a gun law against a Second Amendment challenge, drawing a sharp rebuke from United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito in June.

“The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” Alito wrote in the majority opinion in Wolford v. Lopez in response to the 2024 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling, which the Supreme Court allowed to stand on a technicality. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald). It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8% of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59%).”