The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals

The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals

The present volume is the result of the revision and expansion of two essays entitled Bugs and Beasts before the Law, and Modern and Medival Punishment, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in August and September 1884. Since that date the author has collected a vast amount of additional material on the subject, which has also been discussed by other writers in several publications, the most noteworthy of which are Professor Karl von Amiras Thierstrafen und Thierprocesse (Innsbruck, 1891), Carlo dAddosios Bestie Delinquenti (Napoli, 1892), and G. Toblers Thierprocesse in der Schweiz (Bern, 1893), but in none of these works, except the first-mentioned, are there any important statements of facts or citations of cases in addition to those adduced in the essays already mentioned, for which the writer was indebted chiefly to the[Pg 2] extensive and exceedingly valuable researches of Berriat-Saint-Prix and M. L. Mnebra, and the Consilium Primum of Bartholomew Chassene, cited in the appended bibliography. Professor Von Amira is a very distinguished and remarkably keen-sighted jurisprudent and treats the matter exclusively from a jurisprudential point of view, his main object being to discover some general principle on which to explain these strange phenomena, and thus to assign to them their proper place and true significance in the historical evolution of the idea of justice and the methods of attaining it by legal procedure. Von Amira draws a sharp line of technical distinction between Thierstrafen and Thierprocesse; the former were capital punishments inflicted by secular tribunals upon pigs, cows, horses, and other domestic animals as a penalty for homicide; the latter were judicial proceedings instituted by ecclesiastical courts against rats, mice, locusts, weevils, and other vermin in order to prevent them from devouring the crops, and to expel them from orchards, vineyards, and cultivated fields by means of exorcism and excommunication. Animals, which were in the service of man, could be arrested, tried, convicted and executed, like any other members of his household; it was, therefore, not necessary to summon them to appear in court at a specified time to answer for their conduct, and thus make them,[Pg 3] in the strict sense of the term, a party to the prosecution, for the sheriff had already taken them in charge and consigned them to the custody of the jailer. Insects and rodents, on the other hand, which were not subject to human control and could not be seized and imprisoned by the civil authorities, demanded the intervention of the Church and the exercise of its supernatural functions for the purpose of compelling them to desist from their devastations and to retire from all places devoted to the production of human sustenance. The only feasible method of staying the ravages of these swarms of noxious creatures was to resort to metaphysical aid and to expel or exterminate them by sacerdotal conjuring and cursing. The fact that it was customary to catch several specimens of the culprits and bring them before the seat of justice, and there solemnly put them to death while the anathema was being pronounced, proves that this summary manner of dealing would have been applied to the whole of them, had it been possible to do so. Indeed, the attempt was sometimes made to get rid of them by setting a price on their heads, as was the case with the plague of locusts at Rome in 880, when a reward was offered for their extermination, but all efforts in this direction proving futile, on account of the rapidity with which they propagated, recourse was had to exorcisms and be-sprinklings with holy water. [Pg 4]DAddosio speaks of the actions brought against domestic animals for homicide as penal prosecutions, and those instituted against insects and vermin for injury done to the fruits of the field as civil suits (processi civili); but the latter designation is not correct in any proper sense of the term, since these actions were not suits to recover for damages to property, but had solely a preventive or prohibitive character. The judicial process was preliminary to the utterance of the malediction and essential to its efficacy. Before fulminating an excommunication the whole machinery of justice was put in motion in order to establish the guilt of the accused, who were then warned, admonished, and threatened, and, in cases of obduracy, smitten with the anathema maranatha and devoted to utter destruction. As with all bans, charms, exorcisms, incantations, and other magical hocus-pocus, the omission of any formality would vitiate the whole procedure, and, by breaking the spell, deprive the imprecation or interdiction of its occult virtue. Ecclesiastical thunder would thus be robbed of its fatal bolt and reduced to mere empty noise, the harmless explosion of a blank cartridge. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 43286
Author: Evans, E. P. (Edward Payson)
Release Date: Jul 23, 2013
Format: eBook
Language: English