Animal trial

This article is about legal proceedings involving animals. For the use of animals in drug trials and other experiments, see animal testing.
Illustration from Chambers Book of Days depicting a sow and her piglets being tried for the murder of a child. The trial allegedly took place in 1457, the mother being found guilty and the piglets acquitted.

In legal history, an animal trial was the criminal trial of a non-human animal. Such trials are recorded as having taken place in Europe from the thirteenth century until the eighteenth. The most documented of these trials being from France, but they also occurred in Italy, Portugal, Spain, and other countries.[1]

In the United States, extra-judicial trials were conducted by the "owners" of the animals, chiefly elephants, until the mid-twentieth century, with the trial often ending with the execution of the animal. Elephant executions occurred most frequently in the United States during the carnival-circus era of roughly 1850 to 1950; at least 36 elephants were executed between the 1880s and the 1920s.[2] During this era, elephant behavior was often explained anthropomorphically, and thus granted a moral dimension wherein their actions were "good" or "bad."[3]

In modern times, it is considered in most criminal justice systems that non-human animals lack moral agency and so cannot be held culpable for an act.

  1. ^ "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, by E. P. Evans—A Project Gutenberg eBook". www.gutenberg.org. Retrieved 2024-04-20.
  2. ^ Wood (2012), p. 407.
  3. ^ Nance (2013), p. 108.