The possibility that an animal could be found either innocent or guilty evidences a formidable respect for nonhuman consciousness, a sense that, despite their profound otherness, they are still invested with the powers of thought and intentionality.
ED SIMON: If you were an animal in need of legal representation in early 16th-century Burgundy – a horse that had trampled its owner, a sow that had attacked the farmer’s son… Then the best lawyer in the realm was Barthélemy de Chasseneuz. Though he’d later author the first major text on French customary law, become an eloquent defender of the rights of religious minorities, and be elected parliamentary representative for Dijon, Chasseneuz is most remembered for winning an acquittal on behalf of a group of rats put on trial for eating through the province’s barley crop in 1522… Edward Payson Evans, an American linguist whose book The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906) remains the standard work on the subject…
Dismissing animal trials as just another backwards practice of a primitive time is to our intellectual detriment, not only because it imposes a pernicious presentism on the past, but also because it’s worth considering whether or not the broader implications of such a ritual don’t have something to tell us about different ways of understanding nonhuman consciousness, and the rights that our fellow creatures deserve. From our metaphysics, then, can come our ethics, and from our ethics can derive politics and law. There need not be a return of animals to the stand as defendants, but they’ve already had legal representation as plaintiffs.
The Nonhuman Rights Project, led by the US attorney Steven Wise, has filed briefs on behalf of creatures such as the four captive chimpanzees Tommy, Kiko, Hercules and Leo in New York in 2013, and more recently Happy the elephant, a solitary pachyderm at the Bronx Zoo. Because it’s a phenomenon that’s newly pertinent, it’s imperative for us to think of the history of animal trials in a more nuanced light, beyond the mocking tone in which it can sometimes be discussed…
Animal trials also provide an indication not just about unexpectedly expansive legal reasoning, but a metaphysical position about the similarities between human and animal consciousness that is superior to the Cartesian position that reduced dogs and cats, pigs and cows, to intricate mechanisms. It would be foolish of us to think that the 16th-century French ecclesiastical court thought that rendering a verdict of anathema would have stopped rats from devouring barley, but that’s to ignore why such a trial was held in the first place…
In trying a group of rats for eating crops, there was never an assumption that the rodents would somehow learn their lesson, for the trial wasn’t held for them, but rather for the humans who witnessed the spectacle. Ironically, then, their exoneration as secured by Chasseneuz tells us something surprising about what authorities believed concerning animal agency and interiority, consciousness and personhood…
For sure, not all animals put on trial – Evans records some 189 examples from the 13th until the 18th century – were fortunate enough to have representation as capable as Chasseneuz. Bulls, horses, donkeys and especially pigs were put on trial in civil courts for a variety of crimes, from murder to property destruction, and then often executed. But a surprising number of these creatures were exonerated as well…
The possibility that an animal could be found either innocent or guilty evidences a formidable respect for nonhuman consciousness, a sense that, despite their profound otherness, they are still invested with the powers of thought and intentionality. Contrasting modernity’s largely instrumental understanding of animal-hood, whereby their only functions are as pets, beasts of burden or food…
None of this is to pretend that scholastic theologians were somehow nascent PETA ideologues; meat may have been expensive and rare on peasant tables, but there were precious few vegans during the Middle Ages. Rather, it is to claim that culturally and theologically there was an understanding of animals – their individual uniqueness and independence, as well as their relationship to humanity – that was arguably more sophisticated than the dominate schema that came to prevail. SOURCE…
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