Abstract
This chapter begins with the mysterious image of a cat hanged in 1554 London and investigates whether this particular hanging was similar in nature to the extensive medieval and early modern animal prosecutions in continental Europe reported on by the historian E.P. Evans. It examines the adequacy of Evans’ claims about the periodicity, the geography and the meaning of animal prosecutions. The existence of deodands notwithstanding, no evidence is found of any animal trials in the British Isles. The chapter warns that the power of medieval criminal law to punish animals has been usurped by the bureaucratic regulations attached to the circumstances in which animal shelters and animal control officers put animals to death.
He that kills another’s ox, sins, not through killing the ox, but through injuring another man in his property. Wherefore this is not a species of the sin of murder but of the sin of theft or robbery.
—Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Chapter 3 is a quite different project from those that originally appeared in Beirne (1994) and Beirne (2011).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
John Foxe (1563: 1054). The hanging of the cat-priest is said to have enraged Queen Mary, who demanded that the human perpetrators be found and fined. This does not necessarily imply that Mary’s attitude to cats differed much from that of her younger half-sister Queen Elizabeth, who is reputed to have been delighted at their screeching as they were thrown onto bonfires celebrating her coronation. On this see further Thomas (1983: 146–47).
- 3.
Baraz (2003: 165).
- 4.
- 5.
Besides Evans (1906: 28, 277, 285), among others who have claimed that animal trials occurred in Britain are Hyde (1916: 709), Ives (1914: 256), Ritvo (1987: 1–12) and Tester (1991: 72–77). Trial naysayers include Finkelstein (1981: 74), Thomas (1983: 97–98), Salisbury (1994: 108), Dinzelbacher (2002), Fudge (2002: 121–25) and Shannon (2013: 240). The leading historian of human–animal relationships, Keith Thomas, seems to favour the latter view, though he also somewhat hedges his bets when he observes that ‘England has no real counterpart to that curiosity of continental legal history, the trial and execution of homicidal animals’ (1983: 97).
- 6.
- 7.
On how not to understand the concept of auctor criminis see Westermarck (1906, 1: 257).
- 8.
For example, see Evans (1906), Westermarck (1906, 1: 249–60), Hyde (1916), Frazer (1923: 397–417), Kelsen (1923: 3–8), Finkelstein (1981), Cohen (1986), Tester (1991: 73–75), Berman (1994), Ewald (1995), Wise (2000: Chap. 4), Dinzelbacher (2002), Girgen (2003), Leeson (2013), Oldridge (2005: 40–55), Friedland (2012: 110–16, 280–84), Leeson (2013), Phillips (2013: 30–41), and Spencer and Fitzgerald (2015: 5–8). For descriptions of the belief that inanimate objects such as falling rocks and collapsing beams can commit crime and that they should be punished for harming humans, see Westermarck (1906, 1: 260–65), Hyde (1916: 700, n.17) and Finkelstein (1981: 60). Friedland (2012: 91, 110–12) discusses the burning and ‘execution’ of animal effigies in late medieval and early modern France.
- 9.
On the details of this exaggeration see Friedland (2012: 5–8). Moreover, repeating embellished nineteenth-century descriptions of the hanging of the homicidal sow in Falaise in 1386—of which the only confirmed record is the brief executioner’s quittance (see the document above)—E.P. Evans complained with perhaps unwitting dramatic effect that ‘for having torn the face and arms of a child … the tribunal … sentenced a sow to be mangled and maimed in the head and forelegs, and then to be hanged … the sow was dressed in man’s clothes … a pair of gloves [was given] to the hangman’ (1906: 140). Ian O’Donnell has generously pointed out to me that this sow ‘was dressed in man’s clothes’ when female attire would surely have been more appropriate. Note also that the cat hanged in London in 1554 (see pp. 71–73 above) was dressed as a priest (male again). Does this mean that in popular and/or juridical consciousness it would have been more shocking to hang an animal whose body and garb resembled that of a female criminal?
- 10.
Fried land (2012: 111).
- 11.
About the burning of condemned animals and of the trial records, Cohen documents that ‘[t]his was done, in the words of one French jurist, in order to eradicate all memory of the act’ (Cohen 1986: 18, n.39). Similarly, Finkelstein has speculated that
the death of a human being of which … [the homicidal ox] … was the unwitting instrument precipitated a condition in the social environment that was held to be dangerous—like that caused by a virulent disease—and its traces had to be completely eradicated (1981: 77).
- 12.
The judge’s admonition (my italics) in this Senlis case is provided in Evans (1906: 356–57).
- 13.
This assessment is also expressed in Langbein (1976: 39, n.21). An appendix to the Enchiridion rerum criminalium was published in 1601. Organized alphabetically, it lists crimes, terms, definitions, categories of harm and many of its major legal and religious antecedents. On civil law see Damhoudere’s (1567) Praxis rerum civilium.
- 14.
It is sometimes claimed that Damhoudere’s Enchiridion rerum criminalium merely translated and reproduced Practijke criminele by the Bruges lawyer Philip Wielant (c.1508–10). It is indeed true that Damhoudere’s text was published under his name and without mention of Wielant’s, though this was not an uncommon practice for medieval legal texts. On this issue see further van Caenegem (1988: 43–44).
- 15.
Damhoudere (1570: 435–38). My translation of Damhoudere’s unfamiliar and very difficult (Latin) medieval legalese is greatly indebted to the good advice of Maurice Herson.
- 16.
Damh oudere (1570: 437).
- 17.
- 18.
Damhoudere:
[I]f someone in his own home is feeding a dog, boar, goat, fox, bear, lion, wolf or other wild beast which was a nuisance to someone else, or bit him, or injured him, then this house-owner would be condemned to make reparations for the damages at the discretion of a judge. Because no one has the right to feed or look after this kind of beast to the detriment of another [person] (1570: 437).
- 19.
- 20.
Damh oudere (1570: 436).
- 21.
Damhoudere (1570: 436).
- 22.
Damhoudere (1570: 63).
- 23.
Damhoudere (1570: 63). Damhoudere sensibly adds that executioners—who were often despised by their fellow citizens, especially when they botched their work—should not be gamblers, whoremongers, scandalmongers, impious blasphemers, assassins, thieves, murderers or robbers. Thus, in 1576 an executioner who lacked the proper authorization was banished from the interestingly named town of Schweinfurt, Bavaria, never to return, after he had outraged the citizenry by hanging a sow who had been convicted of killing a carpenter’s child by biting off his ear and tearing his hand. This case led to the proverbial phrase ‘Schweinfurter Sauhenker (Schweinfurt sow-hangman)’. It was used, according to E.P. Evans (1906: 147):
to characterize a low and lawless ruffian … It was not the mere killing of the sow, but the execution without a judicial decision, the insult and contempt of the magistracy and the judicatory by arrogating their functions, that excited the public wrath and official indignation.
- 24.
Ulpian in Watson (1985: 276). Presumably soon thereafter most of those domesticated animals who had physically injured or killed humans would have been ‘put down’. These animal deaths would have been swelled by the similar fates of those animals forced to participate in the ancient Roman practice of the public execution of condemned humans by putting them in an enclosure with hungry lions and leopards (‘Damnatio ad bestias’), also indulged in as entertainment or sport. On how this might have been done, see Aldrete (2014).
- 25.
Damhoudere (1570: 436–37). A handful of early French jurists struggled with the issue of animal intentionality somewhat more than did Doumhedere. For example, see the critical comments of Philippe de Beaumanoir in 1285 and Pierre Ayrault in 1591, and the excellent discussion of their scepticism in Friedland (2012: 112–13, 115–16).
- 26.
According to Cohen (1993: 114–15), customals seldom referred to animal justiciability because to have done so would have flouted the superior status of and respect due to Roman law.
- 27.
- 28.
Aqu inas in Summa Theologica (1266–74, vol. ii, part lxxxvi, article 2, 5143). Thus, a Swiss ecclesiastical court ruled in 1666 that ‘an ox is created for man’s sake, and can therefore be killed for his sake; and in doing this there is no question of right or wrong as regards the ox’ (quoted in Finkelstein 1981: 70).
- 29.
These three questions appear in Malleus maleficarum, at Sprenger and Kramer (1486: 201–10, 330–33 and 375–80, respectively). With the continuing saga of the Autun case of 1510–1530, the prosecution of animals for the felony of crop destruction coincided with that of humans for heresy. On the details of this aspect of the Autun case see Pignot (1880: 225–26) and Ewald (1995: 1901).
- 30.
- 31.
Evans (1906: 162).
- 32.
Evans (1906: 186).
- 33.
Evans praises Bentham’s utilitarian strictures against animal cruelty, for example, and he refers to Henry Salt’s (1892) pioneering book Animal Rights. This is Evans, in his later book Evolutionary Ethics and Animal Psychology, on Salt’s foundational text: ‘if animals may be rendered liable to judicial punishment for injuries done to man, one would naturally infer that they should also enjoy legal protection against human cruelty’ (1898: 13). On his praise for Bentham’s objection to animal suffering—‘Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come … when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes’ (1789: 282)—see Evans (1898: 14).
- 34.
Evans (1884b: 302; see also Frazer 1923: 416–17). CPCPA contains a second, if less ostentatious concern, namely, a rejection of the biological reductionism in Lombrosian criminal anthropology (see further Appendix 1 at the end of this chapter). This is evident from the manner of CPCPA’s presentation, which consists of just two chapters which are ‘Bugs and Beasts Before the Law’ (Chap. 1) and ‘Mediæval and Modern Penology’ (Chap. 2). These two chapters are expanded but discursively identical versions of essays with similar titles that Evans (1884a, b) had published twenty-two years before CPCPA. The first chapter, by Evans the animal rights activist, must thus be seen as a quizzical attack on the mistreatment of animals. The second chapter Evans composed as an essay prior to the stormy 1885 Rome International Congress of Criminal Anthropology as a contribution to the mounting campaign against Lombrosianism. Evans’ aim here was to attack criminal anthropology largely on the grounds that its biologism denied the responsibility and hence the accountability of humans for their crimes. To this end his chosen strategy was iconoclasm, that is, the hurling of ridicule at the penal implications of criminal anthropology.
- 35.
- 36.
Evans (1906: 135).
- 37.
- 38.
Evans (1906: 150). From Evans’ comment that the ass ‘had not participated in her master’s crime of her own free-will’ (my emphasis) it is unclear if he thought some animals were convicted precisely because they had freely chosen to engage in crime. Perhaps his reference to free will here was just a loose use of language on his part, though he adds that ‘[a]s a piece of exculpatory evidence it may be regarded as unique in the annals of criminal prosecutions’ (1906: 151). Even here, he fails to clarify whether the unique ‘it’ refers to the juridical acceptance of free will or to the good curé’s testimony.
- 39.
On early modern notions of vermin, see Cole (2016).
- 40.
Evans notes that in Ansbach in 1685 a ravenous werewolf, supposedly the incarnation of a deceased burgomaster, was tried and hanged by order of the court for having ‘prey[ed] upon the herds and even devouring women and children’ (1906: 195). On the mythology and prosecution of werewolves in early modern Europe see further Otten (1986).
- 41.
On the alleged trial of a dog in Delémont, see Evans (1906: 334).
- 42.
In 1713 Franciscan friars in Brazilian Piedade no Maranhão prosecuted a colony of ants because ‘[they] did feloniously burrow beneath the foundation of the monastery and undermine the cellars of the said Bretheren, thereby weakening the walls of the said monastery and threatening its total ruin’ (Evans 1906: 123–24; and see Frazer 1923: 410–11). Counsel were named for both plaintiffs and defence and, after learned legal argument, the conciliatory judge ruled that the Brethren should appoint a neighbourhood field suitable for habitation by the ants and that the latter should shift their quarters to the new abode or suffer excommunication.
- 43.
About the lone Canadian case Evans states only that it involved turtledoves in the late seventeenth century (1906: 331).
- 44.
On the Connecticut case of 1662 reported by Cotton Mather, see further note 96.
- 45.
On historians’ successive distortions of the Falaise case, see pp. 74–75 above.
- 46.
Finke lstein (1981: 62).
- 47.
Hyde (1916: 700).
- 48.
With regard to Hyde’s controversial discovery of animal trials in classical Athens, Finkelstein’s response is that there are no surviving records of actual animal trials in the city. The surviving accounts of trial procedures, he continues, reveal that they were ceremonial or magical in nature rather than legal (Finkelstein 1981: 58–64).
- 49.
Co hen (1986: 18).
- 50.
Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London 1275–1298 and 1291–1309. In 1419 the Liber Albus of the City of London relaxed the status of those who could lawfully kill wandering pigs when it stated ‘[a]ny swine found in City streets or lanes may be killed by those who found them. Those who kill them should have them to keep freely’ (1419: 235–36).
- 51.
Hum phrey (1987: xxix, n.1).
- 52.
By way of addition, for example, Vagn Greve (1999) describes a case of 1806 in southern Denmark in which citizens had complained that their houses were being overrun by millions of black rats. A householder from Ebberup offered to get rid of the rats. He ordered that they be summoned and that a procurator should be appointed to defend them. A judge then authorized a subpoena for the rats to appear in court, which was issued to them in front of the affected houses. The case was adjourned, however, and the supposed rat exterminator was declared a fraud. (My thanks to my colleague Ragnhild Sollund for generously pointing out this Danish text and also translating it.) See also the five Dutch cases identified in this book (Chap. 3, n.14), none of which is reported in CPCPA.
- 53.
Humphrey (1987: xxiv, n.1).
- 54.
On these diverse and rich sources see further Seetah (2007). For the London area between 1700 and 1900 the zooarchaeologist Yeomans (2007) has charted the geographical relocation of sites for labouring on animal carcasses—the hornworking and the light and heavy leather industries—after the decline of the guilds and the rise of techniques of capitalist production.
- 55.
A major source of irritation was animals’ sludge and stench, which heavy rains aggravated. Blackstone (1765–9, book 3, Chap. 13), for example, recorded in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that animals’ stench could be cause for actionable nuisance:
[I]f a person keeps his hogs, or other noisome animals, so near the house of another, that the stench of them incommodes him and makes the air unwholsome, this is an injurious nusance, as it tends to deprive him of the use and benefit of his house. A like injury is, if one’s neighbour sets up and exercises any offensive trade; as a tanner’s a tallow chandler’s or the like: for though these are lawful and necessary trades, yet they should be exercised in remote places.
- 56.
- 57.
Coroners Rolls of the City of London A.D. 1300–1378 (1913: Roll B (29): 56–57). See also a case of 14 February 1268, when a little boy, John, was lying in a cradle when, ‘through the carelessness of his nurse, a ravenous sow bit off his ear’ (Calendar of the Rolls, 1266–1272: 193). And see the Litton case of 30 May 1590 (documented in Forbes 1973: 379–86):
a London coroner’s inquest recorded that Christopher Litton, a brewer, was riding his master’s blind horse near Puddle Wharf. Litton rode the horse into the river Thames so that he could water and bathe the animal. The horse reared his head, however, and threw Litton into the river. As a result, Litton was swept away by the current and drowned. The horse, which was valued at five shillings, was left in the custody of the brewer ‘for the work and use of the said Sovereign Queen’ according to the law of deodand.
- 58.
Roll A (30): 30–31.
- 59.
Roll F (10): 57–58.
- 60.
Roll G (28): 219–20.
- 61.
Roll H (37): 264–65.
- 62.
Train (1845, 2: appendix to Chap. 13: 3, n.1), who also reproduces the documents that formulated the Manx laws of deodand.
- 63.
‘Deodands Abolition’, 1846, Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 11 August: 1624–26. On the Scottish practice of escheats, see further Forte (1990).
- 64.
- 65.
Evans (1906: 186–90) himself, who thought the deodand ‘an accursed thing’, complained about cases where animals had caused human deaths (1769, book 1, part 2, Chap. 8: 302):
[b]ut juries have of late very frequently taken upon themselves to mitigate these forfeitures, by finding only some trifling thing, or part of an entire thing, to have been the occasion of the death. And in such cases, although the finding of the jury be hardly warrantable by law, the court of king’s bench hath generally refused to interfere on behalf of the lord of the franchise, to assist so odious a claim.
On deodands and their abeyance and abolition in 1846, see Jamieson (1988) and Pietz (1997).
- 66.
Evans (1906: 129).
- 67.
Todd and Curry (1850–53). See also Scot (1665).
- 68.
Evans (1906: 192).
- 69.
Evans (1906: 277).
- 70.
Lou andre (1854: 334).
- 71.
Shak espeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, scene 1, ll. 128–38; and see Evans (1906: 157).
- 72.
Hol den (1990: 143). In arguing that Shakespeare’s wolf is perhaps a direct reference to the Lopez case, Holden adds that ‘if a punning translation of his name were not enough, the word “Wolf” is capitalized (significantly, unless it was a compositor’s error) in the quarto’ (1990: 143; and see Enders 2002).
- 73.
Jac kson (2003).
- 74.
Lauder (1671: xxxii).
- 75.
Jack son (2003: 151, n.86) has recorded that in 1682 the Heriot’s hospital anecdote prompted an anonymous pamphleteer (‘M.D.’) to depict Argyll:
as a dog who apparently swallowed the Test Act whole, but [who] subsequently retched up certain parts, upon which all the assembled child-advocates decreed that ‘all his irksome champing and chowing of it, was only … to separate the concomitant nutrient, and that was mikel worse than a flat refusal of it, and if it were rightly examined, would upon Tryal, be found no less than Leising-making.
- 76.
- 77.
Pertile (1886: 147).
- 78.
With some slight embellishment, the latter reported (Sloet 1887: 248):
Some 25 years ago a cock was punished as a murderer. The Allgemeine Deutsche Strafrechtszeitung, 1861 No. 2 wrote:
Recently, in Leeds, a fighting cock attacked and wounded a child of one year and seven months. This resulted in the death of both the child and ultimately of the cock as well because the jury examining the death decided that the cock should die. The jury personally attended the execution.
In this case, the Cock was punished for an act that only a human can commit and it was thus treated as equal to a human. However, a cock (i.e. the male hen) is able to commit crimes that are impossible for us humans.
- 79.
This newspaper reportage appears in The Observer (‘Death Caused by a Game Cock’), 8 October 1860, p. 7. On the very same page another story was reported in which ‘a married woman named Bellier, at Corville, in France, died of hydrophobia a few days since (having been bitten in the arm by a cat’ (‘Death From the Bite of a Cat’).
- 80.
Even in providing these meagre details, Evans was merely reproducing an earlier uninformative reference to it by von Amira (1891: 559).
- 81.
For his generosity in helping me gather much of this information, I am indebted to Richard Childs, County Archivist of the West Sussex Record Office.
- 82.
Jones (1880: 302–03). An epitaph is appended to Hone’s (1827, 2: 105) ‘The Trial’, as follows:Verse
Verse EPITAPH FOR HONEST PORTER Composed by Sam. Snivel, the parish clerk, proposed to be put, at Farmer Carter’s expense, on the unfortunate malefactor’s tombstone: Here lie the remains of honest PORTER; who, after an innocent and well-spent life, was dragged hither, and tried, for a crime he never committed, upon laws, to which he was unamenable, before men who were no judges found guilty without evidence, and hanged without mercy: to give to future ages an example, that the spirit, of Turkish despotism, tyranny, and oppression, after glutting itself with the conquest of liberty in British men, has stooped at length to wreak its bloody vengeance on British dogs! Anno. Dom. 1771, Requiescat in pace! S.S.
- 83.
Jones (1880: 302–03).
- 84.
Ho ne (1827, 2: 105).
- 85.
- 86.
Ho ne (1827, 2: 105).
- 87.
- 88.
Rick man (1819: 40).
- 89.
Williamson (1973: 41).
- 90.
Hawke (1974: 15).
- 91.
Keane (1995: 70).
- 92.
Pa ine (1775: 331).
- 93.
Pa ine (1775: 332).
- 94.
In his book The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton describes the informal justice meted out to offending cats—some of whom were owned and adored by their master’s wife—by a group of hungry male printer’s apprentices in Paris during the late 1730s. One night the boys, who felt themselves wronged by the well-fed cats ‘gathered round and staged a mock trial, complete with guards, confessor, and a public executioner. After pronouncing the animals guilty and administering the last rites, they strung them up on an improvised gallows’ (Darnton 1985: 77). But why cats? According to Darnton, sensible folk greatly feared cats’ reputed occult powers—and because they had long represented female genitalia and were associated with the cuckolding of men, by killing her cats the apprentices thereby took exquisite revenge on Madame and on her as her husband’s property.
- 95.
Hay (1975: 196). In a personal email (20 June 2016) Douglas Hay informed me that:
‘[t]he comment at p.196 … re the comparison to Tyburn … is mine. It was based on information in a letter (cited in note 5) from Ridgway, Uxbridge’s steward, telling him that a keeper had caught a man on Cannock Wood with some crawfish; the local magistrate, Sir Edward Littleton, who sentenced many of the poachers of Uxbridge’s game, took the opportunity to order that the man’s bulldog be hanged.’ Hay also confided that he had ‘never heard of a lurcher or any other dog being tried. The crime was that of the owner’ (Hay to PB, 23 June 2016).
- 96.
Similarly, Evans (1906: 148–49) claimed, wrongly, that an ‘animal trial’ had occurred in 1662 in the New Haven Colony. In this case ‘a pious wretch’ named Potter, aged about 60, was indeed executed for ‘damnable Bestialities’ with a cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows, who were killed at the gallows before his eyes. The basic facts of Potter’s case are reported in Mather (1662, 2: 348–49).
- 97.
One of the difficulties with Weber’s (for example, 1978: 855–56) finding is that ‘Roman law’ was an evolving body of rules that varied considerably over time and in the purity with which it was received in different European societies. On the geographic penetration of Roman law, see Friedland (2012: 25–67). Bruce Jackson, a leading scholar of Roman law, has argued that by the sixth century the structure of Roman law remedies was not dissimilar to that in modern Britain, including ‘a strict liability remedy based on ownership or custody; traces of strict liability for trespassing cattle; a special form of strict liability for dogs … and all dangerous animals; and general fault-based liability’ (1978: 142–43).
- 98.
This is not to say that the cultural fixedness regarding which particular species were considered vermin and pests was ever steadfast. About moles, for example, Karen Raber (2013: 151–56) shows in her Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture how, in small numbers, their digging could be useful for loosening the soil prior to cultivation. See also the excellent discussions in Lucinda Cole’s (2016: 111–42) Imperfect Creatures on humans’ perceptual fluidity around dogs as both dangerous and familial in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, and in Laurie Shannon’s Accommodated Animal (2013: Chap. 5) on ‘hang-dog looks.’
- 99.
See also Edward Topsell’s (1658) History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, which can be regarded as an early attempt at zoological taxonomy; and Thomas Tusser’s (1593) Five Hundredth Points of Good Husbandrie, which may have provided Shakespeare with his knowledge of husbandry and agriculture. The discursive intent of such manuals was nothing short of the transformation of local communities into pre-capitalist, profit-seeking individuals who worked the land with proper knowledge, ambition, hard work and thrift. Their intended audience, as stated by the influential husbandry author Gervase Markham, was anyone connected to the land but especially ‘every man of discretion and judgement who was desirous of self-improvement’ (1636: 20).
- 100.
For example, see the advice in Read’s Weekly Journal, 1733 (6 January, issue 407). See also the satiric print The Dog Killers of Westminster & London or Licenc’d Cruelty 1760 (Anon. 1760: see Fig. 4.6 above). The Gentleman’s Magazine, the St. James Evening Post and other newspapers also regularly advertised the utility of various other measures to alleviate the problem of encounters with biting dogs. One was the use of a walking stick; another was the much-touted measure of introducing a dog tax, which was intended to prevent dogs from roaming the streets and fields at will.
- 101.
Jenner (1997: 49).
- 102.
Fink elstein (1981: 81).
- 103.
- 104.
Proceedings of the Old Bailey, ref. 16770711-1, accessed 8 June 2015 at http://www.hrionline.ac.uk.luceneweb/bailey.
- 105.
Macfarlane (1970). However, as recently as the early decades of the 19th-century, in cases of murder and manslaughter involving poison, English coroners were sometimes aided in their diagnoses by feeding animals the suspect food or vomit Watson (2006: 381). How frequently coroners’ courts have ordered animals’ deaths in this way or for other reasons is not known, since very few Coroners’ Rolls survive.
- 106.
This legend I have pieced together from contemporary Hartlepool-based local history websites. One website informs visitors that the mascot of the local football club, Hartlepool United, is a monkey named H’Angus, and that in 2002 a candidate for mayor successfully campaigned for election wearing a monkey suit and promising free bananas for school children (see BBC News, 3 May 2002; and ‘Monkey Mascot Elected Mayor’ at www.thisishartlepool.co.uk/history, accessed 29 May 2015). The Hartlepool legend must be given some credence because, according to the Act Concerning Wrecks of the Sea (1275), all ships and goods forced on shore were not to be considered wreckage if ‘a Man a Dog or a Cat escape quick out of the Ship’—in such cases the contents of the ship were to pass into the possession of members of the town where the goods were found. On the Act Concerning Wrecks of the Sea, see further Rule (1975). In the absence of further evidence, however, it remains unclear whether the legendary Hartlepool theriocide speaks more to salvage rights than it does to issues of xenophobia and speciesism.
- 107.
- 108.
- 109.
The Humane Society of the United States, ‘Pet Overpopulation’, accessed 3 July 2016, at www.humanesociety.org/issues/pet overpopulation.
- 110.
Dar win (1871, 1: 173).
- 111.
Lombroso (1895a: 35).
- 112.
- 113.
Ellis (1890: 248).
- 114.
Ferrero (1895: 492).
- 115.
Examples include Ellis (1890: 249–50) and Lombroso (1895, 1: 28–34).
- 116.
Lombroso (1918: 365, 368).
- 117.
Lombroso (1895b: 31).
- 118.
On its scientific aspirations and its changing fortunes see especially Gibson and Rafter (2006: 1–36); see also Rafter, ‘Psychopathy and the Evolution of Criminological Knowledge,’ Theoretical Criminology, 1997, 1(2): 235–59. On its demise after its partial methodological unmasking, see Beirne (1993), Inventing Criminology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, Chap. 6); see also L.A. Farrall (1969), The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement, 1865–1925 (New York: Garland); and Daniel Pick (1989), Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- 119.
On this history see Mark A. Largent (2011), Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (NJ: Rutgers University Press).
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Appendix 1: Animals and Crime in Lombrosian Criminal Anthropology
Appendix 1: Animals and Crime in Lombrosian Criminal Anthropology
The idea that animals can engage in crime was energetically espoused by late nineteenth-century criminal anthropologists, who sought support from Darwin’s claim in Descent of Man that those with the worst moral dispositions revert to a savagery from which we are not far removed.Footnote 110 This idea was pursued by the Italian prison doctor Cesare Lombroso, whose demarcation in 1876 of Homo criminalis from Homo sapiens was based on his notion of the born criminal. In a self-described Archimedes moment, the source of criminality was revealed to Lombroso during his postmortem analysis of the skull of a notorious brigand: ‘I instantly perceived that the criminal must be a survival of the primitive man and the carnivorous animals.’Footnote 111
Lombroso employed anthropometry to claim that born criminals exhibit a constellation of atavistic, ape-like features. After this discovery, he and his disciples next explored the range of species that might be characterized as criminal. Most agreed on the need to start with intelligent animals, common criminal examples of whom were said to be murdering hawks, rogue elephants, lazy beavers, thieving monkeys, wild goats, robber bees and sparrows. In associating criminality with animality, Lombroso himself held that in the search for the origins of crime one might need to go as far back as the lives of various insectivorous plants.Footnote 112
The English eugenicist Havelock Ellis disagreed, reasoning that one could scarcely hope to find genuine vegetable criminals because to be criminal ‘the deed must be exceptional in the species, and must provoke a social reaction among the other members of that species’.Footnote 113 In seeking the atavistic origins of crime, some even suggested that, like Homo criminalis, animals could be born criminals; others argued that the laws of criminal heredity applied equally to humans and animals. William Ferrero divined that almost every form and variety of human crime is found among animals, though he distinguished between animals who harm other animals in the course of the struggle for existence, which is not crime, and those who harm or even murder members of their own species, which is.Footnote 114 Some Lombrosians insisted animals can and do commit crimes against other animals.Footnote 115
If animals can commit crime, then it is only a short step to claiming either that human criminals are animals or, more weakly, that human criminals have animal characteristics. In Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, Lombroso reasoned that the atavism of born criminals may go back ‘far beyond the savage, even to the brutes themselves’—facts which prove ‘the most horrible crimes have their origin in those animal instincts of which childhood gives us a pale reflection’.Footnote 116 At times, he and his followers posited that violent men always had animal instincts, at others that they erupted only with the presence of further inhibition-loosening anomalies such as epilepsy. Some even claimed that criminals were zoophiles (perhaps a Victorian circumlocution for bestiality). Lombroso himself suggested that animals commit crime in the same factual, albeit unconscious, way as members of a mob.Footnote 117 On this point, at least, the Lombrosians stood on the same ground as theorists of crowd psychology, including committed anti-Lombrosians such as the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who referred to crowds and mobs as feminine, fickle and beastly.
Lombrosian criminal anthropology wielded intellectual and social power in Europe from the mid-1870s until roughly the beginning of the 1914–18 war. Its rise and fall have been much studied.Footnote 118 In the United States Lombrosianism exerted considerable influence well into the 1930s; its ideology contributed to the passage of sexual sterilization laws and their accompanying tragedies.Footnote 119
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Beirne, P. (2018). On the Geohistory of Justiciable Animals: Was Britain a Deviant Case?. In: Murdering Animals. Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57468-8_4
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