Animals Put On Trial: Why Was This Done In The Past?
In 1522, the mice of Autun, in French Burgundy, are put on trial. The “crime”: devouring that year’s crops and leaving the farmers without food resources The person in charge of the defense of the mice was the lawyer Barthélemy de Chasseneuz (or de Chassenée), recognized for his skill when defending the animals on trial.
Chassenée took to heart the defense of the poor mice of Autun. When they were declared “in default” because they did not appear at the trial, the lawyer argued that they had not been summoned correctly. Later (when, again, the mice did not appear), he claimed that the cats swarming the streets did not allow them access. In the end, the trial was declared a failure and Chassenée was the winner. Well, and the mice, of course.
Although some historians such as Michel Pastoureau (b. 1947) question the veracity of this story (which, due to its comic nature, is almost incredible), the truth is that similar anecdotes abound in the Middle Ages and the modern era. If you have been surprised, keep reading. In this article we talk about the trials of animals that were carried out in the past, their characteristics and the possible causes that motivated this curious and bizarre phenomenon.
To our mentality, these judgments are absolutely baffling. That’s how it is; Currently there is no doubt that animals, despite being sentient beings, do not have moral capacity and, therefore, are incapable of distinguishing good from evil. Our legal compendium includes the idea that the human being is the only one who can be judged, since he is the only creature that is governed by moral guidelines As we see, it was not like that in past times.
But why were animals judged and condemned in the past? What reasons were there for pigs, horses, cats, dogs, and even pests of caterpillars and locusts to be scrupulously judged, condemned and, very often, excommunicated?
Although there is a belief that these types of trials only occurred in the Middle Ages, the reality is that we have documentation that animals were judged and condemned in ancient Greece. We even know the place: the ancient criminal court of Athens, located on the Acropolis, where open-air trials were held and where animals found “guilty” were sentenced, often to banishment to remove the “contamination” of crime from the community.
Not only animals were subject to judgment in Athens. Objects could also be judged: for example, if a column hovered over a person and caused harm or even death, the column had to be duly judged. Javier Alfredo Molina Roa collects all these aspects in his interesting essay On the trials of animals and their influence on current animal law, where he chronologically reviews this type of phenomena.
Everything seems to indicate, therefore, that at least in the Greek case, criminal acts “filthy” the community and, therefore, had to be judged, whoever the perpetrator was. Later, the jurist Gratian (12th century) stated, in reference to animal trials, that these were not necessary because the animals were guilty, but because there could not be a crime that went unpunished. This reconnects us with the idea of social atonement for the “stain” that the crime itself represented In these cases, it was not so important who committed it, but rather what had been committed.
The human being as “owner” of creation
One of the second reasons that explain the profusion of trials against animals in the past (specifically, during the Christian era) is the biblical basis that the human being is the main creature of divine creation. In the Middle Ages, thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine (very influenced, on the other hand, by Aristotle) expressed the irrationality of animals, which they said were incapable of distinguishing between Good and Evil and, therefore, They had to remain under the “tutelage” of the human being. In reality, this “guardianship” went much further, since medieval Christian beliefs converted the animal into a mere possession of the human while it was firmly believed that God had made animals for the service of man and woman.
Following this idea, for an animal to attack its “owner” was to rebel against the divine order and, therefore, against its very essence. In the medieval centuries and part of the Modern Age, the order established by divinity was something very serious that could not be taken as a joke, and any deviation of this nature was considered a true aberration. Therefore, an animal that attacked a human or acted against his interests was a “criminal” that stood against the very law of God.
Of the “salvation” of animals
A thornier issue was that of excommunications. Because “blasphemous” animals could be excommunicated, and this directly contradicted the Augustinian and Thomistic idea that they did not possess a rational soul. Eveillon, in the 16th century, defends in his Treatise on Excommunications that animals cannot be separated from the bosom of the Church because they have never belonged to it, while only human beings are baptized and, therefore, only this one can be excommunicated. However, the processes of excommunication of animals remained very present until well into the Modern Age.
However, parallel to the belief of the animal as a being endowed with a soul, but not rational, we contemplate in the Middle Ages another theory, which arises from none other than the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans, where in a fragment we can read: The The entire creation waits eagerly to be freed from the bondage of corruption, to participate in the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
The entire creation? Did this mean that animals could also be saved by Christ? Would they also appear before the Last Judgment? This promoted many debates among the scholars of the time, who questioned whether animals were included in the salvation program. Because, if this was so, it meant that they should be treated (and, therefore, judged) like human beings.
A third reason why animal trials were abundant already in Christian times was the widespread belief that the devil possessed the poor creatures so that they would turn against human beings. We return to the same topic: if, according to Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and others, animals lacked a rational soul that would allow them to distinguish between good and evil, there must be something that justified their violent and aggressive actions against humanity.
In this sense, his “rebellion” had to be spurred by an entity that did have the capacity for discernment, and that creature was Lucifer, the fallen angel, the one who had freely chosen to separate himself from God Thus, numerous plagues that decimated entire crops were attributed to the devil, who moved the wills of animals and forced them to rebel against humanity. In this case, the creatures were exempt from direct guilt, although this did not save them from the indispensable trial and the more than probable excommunication.
Medieval Bestiaries
Finally, another reason why animal trials increased during the Middle Ages and part of the Modern Age was the proliferation of what are known as Bestiaries, a pseudoscientific compilation of animals and their different characteristics and attributions. Actually, These types of treaties were more symbolic than naturalistic, since they identified each animal with a specific virtue or defect
The Bestiaries brought about, as Javier Alfredo Molina Roa states in the aforementioned work, a strong anthropomorphization; that is, the assimilation of human ideals and behaviors with animals, which perhaps spurred the view of animals as responsible for crimes that had to be atoned for.
An obvious example of this humanization is the notorious trial of the Falaise sow (1386), accused of killing a baby and eating part of its body, who was tried and sentenced to death and taken to the scaffold dressed as a person, with a jacket. and pants, and even a human mask was put on his head. Needless to say, the animal’s end was just as horrendous as any other condemned to death at the time: the sow was savagely mutilated and hung until she bled to death
Types of animal trials
In his work The criminal Persecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, written in 1906, the linguist EP Evans (who was, by the way, one of the first defenders of animal rights), distinguishes two types of animal prosecutions in history. On the one hand, the plague trials, which were settled in the ecclesiastical courts; on the other hand, individual trials (that is, of a specific animal), which were the subject of civil courts.
All these trials were carried out with the proper legal formalities, including the appearance of witnesses, the actions of the defense lawyer and, of course, the reading of the sentence before the accused animal The causes were, on the other hand, diverse: while in the collective cases of plagues the animals were accused of harming humanity (since they were deprived of their sustenance), in the individual cases crimes of blood; There were many cases of pigs, oxen or dogs that had attacked people and injured them or, outright, killed them.
We also find, especially at the gates of the Modern Age and with the shadow of religious wars hanging over Europe, cases of trials for heresy or blasphemy. Curious is the case of a dog that was tried for barking at the passing of a procession, or of a cat that “dared” to hunt mice on Sunday. The growing hatred between Catholics and Protestants only intensified these types of trials, in a maelstrom of growing religious psychosis.
In light of the documents, we can affirm that animal trials were sadly recurrent since ancient times and, especially, from the 13th century until well into the 17th century. The causes, as we have seen, are varied, and the root may lie in a mixture of all of them.
On the one hand, in ancient times the atonement of crime took precedence as it “stained” the community. The Aristotelian idea that animals had souls, but not rational ones, reached the Middle Ages through thinkers such as Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas which resulted in the idea that human beings were the owners of animals and, therefore, they owed him obedience and respect.
On the other hand, there was also the question of whether animals were also going to be saved by Christ. If this was so, it meant that they were placed on a par with human beings and, therefore, were susceptible to being treated on earth in the same way, which involved prosecuting them and asking them to take responsibility for their actions.
Finally, there are other theories, such as demonic possession, which used animals as instruments for their misdeeds, and the spread of moralizing Bestiaries that identified animals with human virtues and vices. Without forgetting, furthermore, that the poor creatures were the vehicle for the expression of religious hatred during the religious wars
Such a succinct article is not enough to fully expose the strange phenomenon of animal trials in the past. There is still much research to be done and many documents waiting to be discovered and analyzed. Perhaps in the future we will be able to better understand why these trials occurred and what motivated them to take place. By the way, the last animal trial and execution was in 1903. The accused, a circus elephant who had killed three men and who was hanged to death.
