While I was posting in another forum a recent story on the arrest of some backpackers in Iran reminded me of this story wherein squirrels were accused of being British spies (to this day there hasn’t been any word on whether they were red or grey). This in turn made me think of stories where animals were executed for witchcraft in the middle ages.
This has go me wondering; are there any laws in any modern (or no longer existent) nations that allow animals to be prosecuted/arrested/punished, either by law or legal precedent?
There’s a famous story about a town in medieval Switzerland that prosecuted a rooster for laying an egg, as it had clearly entered into a compact with the devil. I googled for it and lo and behold found six more:
But it’s a “sentence” in the metaphorical sense, yes? I mean, there’s not some dog court judge who is banging a gavel and sentencing Fido who is then dragged away by the bailiff.
No, I know this because I was watching the “Berverly Hillbillies,” and the Clampetts were “a-back” in the hills “a-visiting” and Mr Drysdale went out on the Clampett truck to get them (they had flown back). He took along a Elly’s bear, Fairchild, and all of Granny’s moonshine. The bear was great protection from those nasty revenuers.
But the in addition to running the truck on the moonshine, Fairchild got put hooked on it. Both Drysdale and Fairchild wound up in jail, but when Sam Drucker (Who crossed over from “Petticoat Junction”) went to bail him out, we then find out, the bear was just “sleeping it off.” As the sheriff says “You can’t prosecute a bear.” Although Mr Drysdale, was charged to contributing to the delinquency of a bear, as well as running moonshine and being a vagrant
Nope, they are being euthanised. Animals don’t have sufficient rights in that sense to be receiving the death penalty, rather they are receiving what technically comes under “treatment”.
Let us pray that doesn’t become legal prescient. Lest Old Liz starts having people decapitated whenever she loses a game of croquet.
No, they are being killed. “Euthanasia” is properly defined as killing for the good of the victim, almost always “to end suffering.” You euthanize an animal with incurable cancer; you kill or put down a surplus animal or one that is dangerous.
I’m aware many kill shelters misuse the word euthanize to make their staff feel better about what they feel they have to do; that does not make it correct, except in a Orwellian sense of twisting language to control the way people think.
My ex-SIL lived in Nigeria for a while a few years ago working in a preserve to protect the large monkey species, Mandrills. Where she was, the concept of Juju is still very powerful. I don’t know all the implications of it but the locals firmly believed that some people could transform themselves into animals if needed. She got contacted that a mandrill was “arrested” and being held at the local jail in a nearby town because it was believed to be a criminal that transformed himself to get away with it. She and her team had to go to the station, plead with the police, bribe them, and then promise to lock this “prisoner” up on their own preserve. They eventually convinced them. I don’t know what would have happened if they couldn’t get the Mandrill out of jail.
Animals are generally considered property under U.S. law. Obviously, they’re different from a piece of property like a couch, but they are property, and if an animal does something that would be a crime if a person did it, the animal’s owner is legally responsible.
I’m not sure what you mean. They can be sought as damages in civil suits, but they can’t be prosecuted. A sum of money can’t be a defendant.
I took a couple of Medieval Studies classes in the early to mid eighties, and the professor mentioned a case where a falling roof timber was put on trial and executed by burning. It had fallen and killed someone.
Not sure how prevalent the prosecution of inanimate objects was. He only mentioned one case with no details.
I’ve never heard of prosecuting inanimate objects but there are two possibilities. The first is that it might be possessed by a devil and it is really the devil on trial. The other is that they may not have had much in the way of a coroner’s court of enquiry and had to use criminal procedures to establish whether for instance, the owner was negligent in allowing material to become dangerously dilapidated. Finding the material guilty would amount to finding the owner not responsible.
In modern times, intent and compos mentis rule animals out but they were often tried in the Middle Ages (once at least a cockerel for laying an egg - not that uncommon). Again, the alternative might have been that if the animal was not responsible, then somebody had bewitched it, so it was better to condemn the animal than let a witch hysteria loose.
