Enemies of the People
IVE a dog a bad name and hang him,' says the proverb. The curious thing is that until compara- tively recent times dogs, and other animals as well, used to be hanged for their misdeeds. The last dog, or anyhow the last European dog, to suffer (at Delemont in Switzerland) this fate had helped his master and his master's son to murder a man called Marger. All three were found guilty, but the two human beings got off with life sentences; only the dog went to the gallows. This happened in 1906.
. In the Middle Ages legal proceedings against animals fell into two broad categories. Secular courts pronounced sentence (normally of death, though in Russia at the end of the seven- teenth century a he-goat got off with exile to Siberia) on domestic animals; their commonest offence was homicide and the legal procedures involved in dealing with (say) a sow that had killed a child or a bull that had gored a man to death were not normally elaborate. Acquittals were rare, though in cases where more than one animal was accused of the same crime, sometimes only the ringleader was punished.
Animals which were not subject to human control presented a knottier problem. The Church had to be called in to deal with insects, rodents, reptiles and other forms of vermin, and the legalities were apt to be complex as well, of course, as ineffective. But a trial was regarded as an essential pre- liminary to the mumbo-jumbo of conjuring the creatures to go away or pronouncing an anathema on them; a few of them were brought into the court and an advocate was often pro- vided for their defence.
The court's verdict depended largely on whether the moles or caterpillars or whatever they were were regarded as emissaries of the Devil or as agents of the Almighty. In the first case they were usually sentenced to banishment in some remote and inhospitable region; in the second they were given a permis de sejour in a part of the district where it was hoped that they could not do very much harm.
* * * One would have thought that there was even less future, from a lawyer's point of view, in defending noxious animals before an ecclesiastical court than in prosecuting them, but in the sixteenth century at least one 'French jurist is said to have made his name with a brief of this kind. He was called
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Chassende, and he appeared for some rats which were on trial for feloniously guzzling the entire barley crop of the district of Autun. He had small hope of establishing his clients innocence, but he resorted with considerable success to those delaying tactics for which the law (or so I have always under' stood) provides almost limitless opportunities.
First of all he argued that the proceedings were out of order. Only one summons had been issued, and it had been issued in only one place. His clients resided in a large number of parishes, in each of which (he respectfully submitted) a sully mons would have to be issued before the accused were bound to appear.
His point was conceded and the court adjourned. The first summons was annulled, and the formalities involved in issu' ing new ones took some time to complete. When the court reassembled Chassende apologised for the failure of the majority of his clients to appear before it. This, he said, was not due to contempt but to the cats, whose hostility to the accused was a matter of common knowledge and whose attitude made the journey prohibitively dangerous. Addressing the court at great length, he argued that a defendant could not be required to answer a writ if to do so exposed him to extreme peril.
The records (of which the last pages have, ironically enough, been destroyed in the course of the centuries by some anti' social form of insect life) do not include the sentence passed upon the rats of Autun, still less an account of how it was carried out. But the proceedings, which seem to have been taken with complete seriousness throughout, laid the founda' tions of Chassende's career; and I dare say that, down the ages, legal reputations have been less firmly based.
One might have thought that, where valuable domestic animals were concerned, a formula would have been found whereby the death penalty could be commuted to some lesser sentence; a bull (for instance), however delinquent, was an important asset to its owner and often to the community as a whole. But not only do these mundane considerations seem to have carried no weight, but the flesh of the executed animal was not used, its carcass being burned or buried—in the latter case generally under the gallows or in the plot of ground set' aside for the interment of human criminals. It is true that in Ghent in 1578 the sentence of death on a cow decreed that her meat should be sold and half the proceeds given to the injured party and the other half to the poor; but this was exceptional, and even in this case her head had to be exhibited on a stake near the gallows.
A much more grisly exhibit was on view at Ansbach just over a century later. A wolf, believed to reincarnate the spirit of a burgomaster who had just died, had been giving a lot of trouble, and when it was killed 'its carcass was clad in a tight suit of flesh-coloured sere-cloth, resembling in tint the human skin, and adorned with a chestnut-brown wig an°, a long whitish beard; the snout of the beast was cut off alm, a mask of the burgomaster's features substituted for it, and the counterfeit presentment thus produced was hanged by order of the court.'
This is a quotation from The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, by E. P. Evans. I see from the fly-leaf that I bought my second-hand copy twenty-nine years ago. I must have thought at the time that it would conic in useful one day; and now (I hope) it has. sTRIN
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