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Nearly 500 years ago, in the town of Autun, France, a young lawyer named Bartholomew Chassenée took on a case defending a group of young troublemakers against erroneous criminal charges brought forward by the Catholic Church. Facing off against the Church was a really big deal, especially for a young, ambitious lawyer, and after a series of clever legal tricks he prevailed. Oh yeah, also, his clients were a bunch of rats. Let me explain. Autun's barley crop had been decimated by a rat infestation.
Affected farmers asked the Church to intervene, and the Church in turn charged the rats with destruction of property in their ecclesiastical court. Chassenée was looking to make a name for himself, and decided that defending the rats would be a high profile way to kick-start his career. On the first day of proceedings, when Chassenée showed up to the courthouse, the rats were nowhere to be seen. This was to be expected of course, but the judge's first move was to take this as an indication of their guilt. Thinking quickly, Chassenée informed the judge that the notice to appear in court had been posted exclusively inside the town of Autun.
The supposed crime had taken place outside of town, so it was reasonable to assume that's where the defendants lived as well. Chassenée argued that the court had an obligation to provide adequate notice to his clients, even though they were, you know, rats. The judge reluctantly agreed, and issued an order instructing every rat in the diocese to appear in court. This time, notices would be posted everywhere.
Several days later, Chassenée showed up to court for a second time, and again, his clients were nowhere to be seen. The judge was prepared to call it quits right there, but Chassenée came back with another argument. He said that whenever farmers appeared in court, they were usually given several weeks to get their affairs in order. His clients were farmers of a different sort, so why weren't they being shown the same respect? Chassenée was being annoying, but he kinda had a point. The judge delayed proceedings for several weeks so that the rats could get their affairs in order.
Whatever that means. Weeks later, they met for a third time. Surprise, no rats. Chassenée burst in there FULL OF BEANS. He informed the judge that OF COURSE his clients had every intention of coming in today. However, he had only now discovered to his dismay that the streets of Autun were ABSOLUTELY CRAWLING with cats! His clients, Chassenée said, were afraid for their lives! The judge was allowing assassins to hang around just outside the courthouse! This was Unacceptable! He told the judge that it would be impossible for his clients to appear in court until every cat in Autun had been moved indoors.
An extremely annoyed judge issued a notice for people to pretty please with sugar on top move their cats indoors. Proceedings were adjourned until a future date TBD. No date was ever set. People moved on with their lives, and the matter was set aside. Chassenée had successfully badgered the Church into dropping the case. So that's a weird story, we could just leave it there and move on with our lives, but it does raise an interesting question. Can animals commit crimes? Why did the people of Autun try to bring the full weight of the law against something that was so clearly just an act of nature?
Believe it or not, to answer this question we have to go all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Murder trials in ancient Greece were held out in the open air. Every flavour of murder trials. By that I mean human murder trials, inanimate object murder trials, and yes, animal murder trials. The principle at work here is that the Greeks believed that murder disrupted the moral equilibrium of a city, and that it created a sort of unseen pollution that seeps into every aspect of society. That's why they held their murder trials out in the open air.
You don't want innocent people breathing in those murder fumes. But why for inanimate objects and for animals? The pollution imagery is key to explaining this. The Greeks made no distinction between an accidental and a purposeful killing. It made very little difference to them whether a death came from a person with a knife, a falling roof tile, or a kick from an animal. In each of these scenarios it would have been classified as a murder, and each murder would have emitted unseen pollution into the community. If enough of this unseen pollution built up over time, it might result in a plague, or
a crop failure, or a natural disaster. The fate of the entire community depended keeping this pollution to a minimum. So how could they do this? Simple. Murderous inanimate objects and animals were put through a formal trial, and if found guilty, they were expelled beyond the borders of the city. This act of expulsion was thought to cleanse the city of its unseen pollution. This tradition persisted for a long time.
It eventually spread to the Roman world where it came into contact with the early Church. Flash forward to Medieval Europe. By this time the Church still believed that animals could commit crimes, but the rationale had evolved. Like the Greeks, the Medieval Church believed that the act of murder somehow infected the entire community. However, their version of this came not in the form of an unseen pollution, but instead in the form of evil forces. Sometimes this evil was explicitly described as demonic or Satanic, and sometimes it was a little more vague.
To put it simply, the Medieval Church's position was that evil attracted evil. One murder brought evil forces into the community, which made a second murder more likely. A second murder did the same, and made a third murder more likely. It was a vicious cycle that had the potential to destroy an entire community. So how did animals play into this? For theological reasons, the belief was that animals were slightly more susceptible to evil than humans were. When an animal committed a violent act, it was an early indication that worse things were in store for the community.
Whereas animal trials in ancient Greece were an act of cleansing, animal trials in Medieval Europe were an act of deterrence. Animal trials in Medieval and Early Modern Europe were divided into two distinct categories. There were animal trials in the secular courts, and animal trials in the ecclesiastical, or religious courts. The secular courts dealt exclusively with domesticated animals. Cats, dogs, horses, pigs, whatever. The argument here was that domesticated animals were servants to humanity, and could therefore be considered members of the household.
Under this worldview, domesticated animals were subject to human law, just as any other member of a household would be. The ecclesiastical courts on the other hand dealt with creatures beyond human control. Rats, locusts, termites, snakes, stuff like that. As we've seen, the belief was that animal crimes had to be prosecuted so that evil forces were deterred from seeping into the community. When it came to domesticated animals, the courts were perfectly capable of treating them just like any other defendant. However, that was not the case when it came to rats or insects.
How was one to properly evaluate which rat destroyed which crop, or which specific termite caused a roof to cave in? It's an impossible task. Fortunately, the Church had tools that the secular courts lacked. Excommunication and exorcism. This was handy because it was a fairly simple matter to excommunicate a swarm of locusts, for example, without having to physically interact with them. Bartholomew Chassenée defended the rats of Autun in ecclesiastical court, so just for kicks let's take a look at the trial of a domesticated animal that took place in secular court.
In 1474, in the city of Basel, an egg was discovered in the pen of a male rooster. Settle in, get out your detective hat, take some puffs on your pipe, 'cause this one's stone cold whodunit. The people of Basel figured it out pretty quickly. The rooster laid the egg! A small minority of you might have another solution in mind, but that's just your dumb tiny brain being a stupid idiot. OB-VI-OUS-LY this is the work of the supernatural! But here's the important bit. It was a crime for a rooster to lay an egg.
Rooster eggs were believed to be ingredients in a spell that could be used to create a basilisk. Wait a second. that's uh. huh. This is all very silly, obviously, but think back to the theoretical model that lay behind Medieval and Early Modern animal trials. Rooster eggs were all tied up with magic, maybe witchcraft, maybe even Satanism, which meant that a rooster laying an egg was an evil act. If they allowed something like this to go unanswered, other evil forces would seep into their community.
The unfortunate rooster was charged with the crime of cavorting with Satan. The rooster's lawyer argued that sure, his client laid an egg, and sure, rooster eggs were used in magical spells, but the act itself, the laying of the egg, was entirely involuntary. Since no spell had been cast, no evil act had actually occurred. If no evil act occurred, deterrence was unnecessary. This was nothing more than a simple act of nature. It's a clever argument, but it didn't take. The prosecution argued that it was irrelevant whether or not the laying of the egg had been an involuntary act, because it was technically possible that some kind of demon had physically
entered the body of the rooster and laid the egg for him. They argued that voluntary or not, a rooster laying an egg was an evil act under any circumstance, and so long as this crime went unpunished, the entire city was in danger. The prosecution's argument won the day. The unfortunate rooster was condemned to death and burned at the stake. But not everybody was cool with putting animals on trial. Over this entire period, there was a tonne of work going on behind the scenes to rationalize and reform this system. A lot of this work - especially early on - was actually happening inside the Church.
Thomas Aquinas spends a lot of time in his 13th century work Summa Theologica tackling the nature of evil, and more specifically, the nature of evil in nature. He eventually arrives at the position that the natural world is inclined towards perfection. But that isn't to say that evil doesn't exist in the natural world. Clearly it does. Aquinas says that when an animal performs an evil act, it is in a way malfunctioning or somehow deformed in their nature.
He goes on to say that taking these creatures out of nature is fine, but since nature is inclined towards perfection, this should be extremely rare. In other words, he's saying that animals should only be charged with crimes when there's something very clearly wrong with it. Nature is inclined towards perfection, so in practice it should usually be fine to just leave animals alone. This is a pretty modern perspective, and it's remarkable that something like it was coming out of the Church in the 13th century. So the theoretical groundwork had been laid.
According to Aquinas, animal trials should be rare. But sadly, this argument did not catch on. In fact, in the centuries following Aquinas's death, animal trials actually became more common than ever. Here's a typical example. In 1379, near the town of Saint-Marcel in Burgundy, a herd of pigs became overexcited and trampled a young boy. He later died of his injuries. Think back to Thomas Aquinas. Were these pigs somehow deformed in their nature? It's hard to say without being there, but probably not, right?
It sounds like it was just a tragic accident. But the town did not follow Aquinas's lead. The three pigs who did most of the trampling were brought into secular court and sentenced to death. The town still was not satisfied. They returned to the secular court for a second bite of the apple, and argued that actually, the rest of the pigs had demonstrated by their squealing and aggressive behaviour that they approved of the young boy's murder. They were accomplices. The judge bowed to public pressure and sentenced the rest of the herd to death as well. A prior at the local monastery was bothered by this.
He didn't think it was right for the town to execute all of its pigs over a tragic accident. He wrote to Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy explaining the situation and asking him to pardon all but the three main pigs. The Duke agreed. The rest of the herd was pardoned, and the matter was settled. What's interesting about this incident is that it shows how the Church and the nobility were working together and pushing for moderation, and how normal people were pushing the courts toward maximalist punishments.
Animals trials persisted for centuries. Many came to view it as a superstitious holdover from the Medieval period, but nevertheless, it was a practice that would not die. In the 17th century, the philosopher René Descartes spent a lot of time and effort making the argument that animals were wholly incapable of committing any crimes whatsoever. His argument went a little something like this. All animals are automatons, meaning that they have no sense, no feeling, and no inner life. A phase that he likes to use over and over again is that animals only follow the disposition of their organs.
According to Descartes, a creature acting purely on instinct is in perfect accordance with nature, and is therefore incapable of evil. Descartes argued that putting animals on trial was meaningless, no different than putting inanimate objects on trial, which is funny because that's exactly what the ancient Greeks used to do. Descartes's successors picked up this argument and ran with it. People continued to argue about the nature of evil and stuff like that, but the basic worldview that said that it was meaningless to charge animals with crimes actually caught on.
By the 18th century, animal trials were becoming less and less common. By the 19th century, they were a novelty. So Medieval Europeans saw humans and animals as operating within the same moral Universe. Descartes and his Enlightenment successors rejected this worldview, and argued instead that animals were incapable of moral agency, operating entirely in reaction to the disposition of their organs. In the 19th century, the pendulum swung back in the other direction. Charles Darwin and his successors made a series of discoveries that turned the Enlightenment worldview when it came to animals on its head.
In "The Descent of Man," Darwin writes that so long as animals hit a certain baseline of intelligence, "any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience." This was a straightforward rejection of the Descartes and Enlightenment worldview. According to Darwin, animals are not automatons. So long as they possess some intelligence, they are capable of full moral agency, no different from humans. Since the Darwinian Revolution went back to arguing that humans and animals operated within the same moral Universe, you'd think that this would re-ignite the Medieval and Early Modern practice of putting animals on trial.
Thankfully, it did not. By the 19th century, the practice had been in decline for at least 100 years. People were a lot less worried about an evil act precipitating some kind of metaphysical threat to an entire community. Instead, they went the other way with it. Since animals were now believed to possess full inner lives, Darwin and others pushed for preservation and compassion whenever possible. Before too long, most of Europe had outlawed the public execution of animals. Legislation dealing with animal cruelty quickly followed. By the 20th century, virtually in the blink of an eye, the practice of putting animals on trial had vanished from Europe. Which is good!
