How Animals Were Put on Trial

Records of these trials come mostly from France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy; around 200 cases have been collected. Pigs made up the largest share of defendants, for an everyday reason: they wandered freely through villages, ate whatever they found, and infants were often left alone.

The procedure was the standard one used for adults. The animal was arrested and kept in the same jail as a person, assigned a defense lawyer, witnesses were summoned, and records were kept. In 1457, in a Burgundian village, a sow was sentenced to death for killing a child, while her 6 piglets, tried as accomplices, were released: they were too young, and their involvement was not proven.

The execution was public - and that is where it all makes sense. In Falaise, Normandy, in 1386, a pig was hanged before a crowd, and the executioner was paid the same rate as for executing a person. The story that it was dressed in human clothing beforehand comes from later retellings. The defendant understood nothing. The spectators understood everything.

Pests could not be caught or executed, so they were handled by church courts. Rats, weevils, and caterpillars were issued summonses - read aloud right in the field - assigned a defense lawyer, and, after failing to appear, cursed and ordered to leave the land. The verdict was often conditional: leave, and the parish must faithfully pay its tithe. In this logic, crop failure was a punishment for people, and the procedure returned it to people too.

The defense worked in earnest. Lawyer Bartholomew Chasseneux became famous at the start of the 16th century precisely for defending rats in Autun: first, he proved that the summons had not been sent to every parish, then that his clients could not appear safely.

The peak came in the 16th century, and by the end of the 18th century, trials had nearly died out. It was not compassion that broke down, but the framework: responsibility came to require understanding. If an animal cannot understand a prohibition, there is nothing to try it for - and the case shifts to the owner who failed to keep watch. The pig turns from a defendant into property, and the proceeding into a dispute over negligence.