E. Randall Floyd can be reached at Rfloyd2@aol.com.FILE/STAFF

Animals have been put on trial for years

Web posted May 2, 1999

By E. Randall Floyd
Columnist

In the spring of 1804, a horse accused of trampling a boy to death near Regensburg, Germany, was hauled into court and ordered to stand trial for murder.

After a trial that lasted two weeks and saw at least three lawyers arguing on the horse's behalf, the animal was found guilty and executed by firing squad.

``The killer horse is dead,'' a local newspaper proclaimed. ``Justice has been done.''

Five years earlier, near Woodbridge, England, a judge found two pigs guilty of digging up and eating a corpse. The pigs were sentenced to death by drowning.

Punishing animals that break the law is a practice as old as the Bible. According to the Book of Exodus, ``When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned.''

Four-footed beasts aren't the only creatures that have been tried and sometimes executed for criminal behavior. Offenders have included horseflies, moles, caterpillars, locusts, snails and a Russian goat that was banished to Siberia at the end of the 17th century.

The first recorded ``animal'' trial was in 864, when the Diet of Worms decreed that a hive of bees that had stung a man to death should be suffocated.

St. Bernard was preaching in a French church in the 11th century when a swarm of flies irritated him with their buzzing. He excommunicated them on the spot. The next day heaps of flies had to be shoveled out of the church -- killed, it is suspected, by an overnight frost.

More often it was the larger animals that were brought to justice. In 1639 a horse was sentenced to die at Dijon in France for throwing its rider and causing his death.

Birds, too, were not immune from the law. In 1471 a chicken in Basel, Switzerland, was found guilty of laying a brightly colored egg ``in defiance of natural law.'' It was burned to death at the stake as ``a devil in disguise.''

Pigs roamed the village streets in France in the Middle Ages -- a freedom that the law sometimes held them to have abused. One was hanged in 1394 in Normandy for eating a child. A sow and her six piglets were accused of a similar crime in 1547. The sow was executed, but her piglets were spared because of their youth and the bad example set by their mother.

Animal trials were normally conducted according to established legal procedure, and some lawyers made a reputation as defense counsel. The trial of a bear that had ravaged some German villages in 1499 was delayed for more than a week for legal arguments over whether it had a right to be tried by its peers -- in this case of jury of other bears.

Bartholomew Chassenee, a French lawyer, made a reputation with his skillful defense of some rats that had destroyed a barley crop in 1521. When his clients failed to appear, he successfully argued that the summons was invalid: It should have been served on all the rats in the district.

When the new summons also was ignored, Chassenee pleaded that ``evilly disposed cats'' belonging to the prosecutors were intimidating them and demanded a cash guarantee that the cats would not molest the rats on their way to court. The prosecution refused to give this guarantee, and the case was dismissed.

Animals have appeared in court not only as felons, but also as witnesses in murder trials. In Savoy in the 17th century it was believed that God would give an animal or bird the power of speech rather than allow a murderer to escape justice. So, if a man accused of committing a murder in his own house swore his innocence in front of his own domestic animals and they made no protest, then he was acquitted.

One of the strangest ``animal'' cases was that of the Italian caterpillars that were asked to appear in court in 1659 on charges of trespassing and willful damage to property. A copy of the summons was nailed to a tree in each of the five districts where the damage had occurred.

The accused were asked to return to the woodlands and to refrain from destroying the crops. The court in fairness conceded the caterpillars' right to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, provided that their behavior did not ``destroy or impair the happiness of man.''

In the 19th century, American families plagued by rats would send them a polite letter asking them to leave. All proper courtesy was observed by coating the letter with butter and molasses and ``posting'' it in the rats' warren.

Trials of animals survived in Europe into the present century. The most recent was in Switzerland in 1906, when two brothers and their dog were tried for murder. The men were sentenced to life imprisonment, but the dog was condemned to death.

As recently as 1974 in Libya, a dog was tried for the crime of biting a human and sentenced to a month's imprisonment on a diet of bread and water. It served its sentence and was released. Justice was seen to have been done.

E. Randall Floyd can be reached at Rfloyd2@aol.com.