Animal trial
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[edit] History
Animals and insects faced the possibility of criminal charges for several centuries across many parts of Europe. The earliest records of such trials date from the twelfth century, and they remained part of several legal systems until the eighteenth. They appeared before both church and secular courts, and the offences alleged against them ranged from murder to criminal damage. Human witnesses were often heard and in church courts they were routinely provided with lawyers (this was not the case in secular courts, but for most of the period concerned, neither were human defendants). If convicted, it was usual for them to be executed, or exiled or excommunicated by the local priest(s). The type of animals put on trial were almost invariably either domesticated ones (most often pigs, but also bulls, horses, and cows) or pests such as rats and weevils. Alleged werewolves were also put on trial on several occasions, particularly in sixteenth-century France, though the allegation in such cases was levelled against defendants who were human (to the naked eye, at least). Creatures that were suspected of being familiar spirits or complicit in acts of bestiality were also subjected to judicial punishment, such as burning at the stake, though few if any ever faced trial.
Translations of several of the most detailed records can be found in E.P. Evans' The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, a minor classic of legal weirdness published at the turn of the last century. Sadakat Kadri's The Trial: Four Thousand Years of Courtroom Drama (Random House, 2006) contains another detailed examination of the subject. He shows that the trials were part of a broader phenomenon that saw corpses and inanimate objects also face prosecution; and argues that an echo of such rituals survives in modern attitudes towards the punishment of children and the mentally ill.
[edit] Popular culture
- The film The Advocate (UK: Hour of the Pig) is centered on the prosecution of a homicidal pig. Several episodes reflect historical events and its scriptwriters evidently consulted actual trial transcripts, though the plot revolves around an ahistorical conceit - in that Colin Firth plays the swine's defence attorney, but there is no recorded instance of a lawyer representing an animal charged with murder. (There are several cases, by contrast, where attorneys appeared for creatures in ecclesiastical courts - and several rats and beetles, for example, won famous court victories as a result.)
- Julian Barnes describes a trial against a woodworm in his book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.
