A fellow coworker used to keep a list of interesting titles on the wall in our former office. One of them was "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals."
Published in 1906, the book was no joke--until the 1700's (possibly the 1800's), non-human creatures were occasionally (though not at all rarely) brought to trial in Europe. Thus, courtroom defendants (in both church and secular courts) were sometimes common pests such as rats and snails, as well as domesticated animals, such as horses and dogs.
But especially the pig. History of non-human criminal sentencing is rather rife with records of swine execution for criminal acts. In fact, the first known animal trial was that of a pig near Paris accused of killing a child and sentenced by monks to public burning. Another pig, also convicted of killing a child, was killed in snout-for-a-snout manner in the town square--executed in the same way it had "murdered" its alleged victim.
But not all the non-human executions were put on public display. Just as for humans at the time, though many were sentenced to burn at the stake, some were doomed to live burial, some to "knocks on the head," and others to imprisonment and subjection to the rack.
The latter practice is a good example of how humans and non-humans were treated equally in trial and prosecution--for though judges knew that non-human beasts could not utter the confession normally expected from a trip to the rack, the gears of justice were sworn to turn no differently for any defendant--human or otherwise.
The belief that non-human creatures lack a moral judgment that thus excludes them from the ability to commit murder or engage in criminal damage of property with the same awareness of a human is a common modern notion. But for the many centuries that non-humans (and even some corpses and inanimate objects) were tried and executed for alleged crimes, beliefs and understanding of the world were quite different in some ways than in most of today's modern cultures.
For one thing, there was a wide belief in "familiar spirits"--supernatural entities thought to aid witches and others in the practice of magic (whether "good" or "evil"). These intelligent spirits were believed to have the ability to manifest themselves in different forms--including that of humans. Perhaps that's why the aforementioned sow executed in the town square was first dressed in human clothes.
But it's more likely that the poor, persecuted pig was simply born in the wrong place at the wrong time--when humans and non-humans were believed more equal in some ways than they are now. Sadly, where we met eye-to-eye was in a position of potential eye-for-an-eye punishment.
But the belief of human/non-human equality lives on in some. Thankfully, in more reverent ways. For instance, when Charles Baudelaire conjured in verse the image of a cat as a "familiar spirit" of its home, he was merely expressing admiration in a way similar to Jean Cocteau's later quote that cats eventually become a home's "visible soul."
Speaking of Cocteau, he had another quote that reminds me a little of this topic: "An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture." Just as a cow that has broken your fence can moo neither a plea of "guilty" nor "not guilty."
