CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY OF ANIMALS

vigilance of their hereditary enemies, the cats, which lay in wait for them. This plea was seriously argued and admitted. How the trial terminated is not a matter of record. Chassenee later wrote a treatise on the excommunication of animals. He did not doubt that insects and other animals could be forced to withdraw from a place where they were doing harm, under penalty of perpetual malediction; and confined his book largely to the question of procedure. He laid especial emphasis upon the observ ance of legal forms. An excommunication would be void if pronounced after a trial not regular in every respect. A local French historian records such a trial as having taken place in 1584. There was in that year a great pest of caterpillars in Dauphine. He says: "The grand vicar of Valence cited the caterpillars to appear before him, and appointed a counsellor to defend them. The case was solemnly pleaded and they were condemned to leave the diocese. But they did not obey the order. Human justice does not have con trol over the instruments of divine justice. It was decided to proceed against the animals by anathema and imprecation, and, as they call it, by malediction and ex communication. But two lawyers and two theologians having been consulted, they persuaded the grand vicar to resort only to adjuration, prayer, and the sprinkling of holy water." The caterpillars disappeared, but the skeptical historian adds that "the life of these insects is short, and the de votions having continued several months were credited by the people with having exterminated the pest." l In some cases the obnoxious animals 1 Chorier, "Histoire generate du Dauphin^," quoted in "Themis on Bibliotheque du Juris consulte," I, 196.

were generously forewarned of threatened punishment. In Beaujeu in 1488 insects were warned to cease their depredations, and the bishop's proclamation continued, "if they do not heed this our command, we excommunicate them and smite them with our anathema." As has been said, cases involving the death penalty were tried by the civil courts. In 1379 three sows which had killed the son of a swineherd were, after due process of law, condemned to death. The swineherd was at the time attending two herds of swine, which by their cries and actions manifested their approval of the crime of the three sows, and all the swine in the two herds were sentenced to death as accomplices in the murder, but were graciously pardoned by Philip, Duke of Burgundy. In 1394 a pig was hanged at Montaign in France for having sacrilegiously eaten a consecrated wafer, and in another case where a pig was on trial for killing a child it was urged as an aggravation of the offence that the pig ate of the child's flesh, "although it was Friday." There are frequent references in nonlegal literature to the trial and execution of animals. Perhaps few people in reading Les Plaideurs have thought of the trial of the dog as more than a farce, yet if we remember that such trials were not in frequent in the France in which Racine lived, the scene may well be considered as a satire upon a grave judicial abuse. Shake speare refers to such a practice when he has Gratiano say to Shylock : "thy currish spirit Governed a wolf, who hanged for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhallowed dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolfish, bloody, starved and ravenous." WASHINGTON, D. C., December, 1907.