Guilty Pigs by Barnett Katy;Gans Jeremy; & Jeremy Gans

Author:Barnett, Katy;Gans, Jeremy; & Jeremy Gans [Barnett, Katy & Gans, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Despite the judge’s vehement and compelling criticism of Riggs’ and Koda’s handlers, the case was a vindication of sorts for the dogs themselves, or at least their noses: the house where the man was found turned out to be the home of the stolen car’s passenger, whom the police had successfully arrested after the crash.

Animals as Experts

Earlier, we explained how South Africa’s police played a crucial early role in establishing broad acceptance of the use of tracker dogs. South African police were able to leverage their country’s racial divisions to convince the public to accept the use of dogs in some settings, which – decades later, and following the widespread use of dogs during World War II – led to the public acceptance of police dogs throughout the developed world. However, the South African courts had a different view on the matter. At an early stage, they baulked at relying on evidence from animal tracking in criminal prosecutions. Indeed, they still baulk at it, although now they are almost alone in taking such a stance. Other courts shifted from treating dogs as beyond understanding in legal settings to accepting that their input can justify police action and criminal punishment.

In 1918, an Eastern Cape court assessed the effectiveness of a typical way dogs in that era were used to track evidence. In one of the matters considered by the court, police investigating stock thefts used a dog to track some footprints to the accused’s home and then improvised a line-up of sorts. The accused and two others were made to stand 30 yards apart, and the dog was repeatedly instructed to find the source of the footprints and picked the accused each time. The judge in the case, Sir Thomas Graham, a former prime minister of the Cape Colony, endorsed the method as a way to identify possible culprits and encourage them to confess, but drew the line at courts relying on the same method to infer guilt. He ruled that ‘it would be a dangerous innovation to allow the introduction of the evidence of irrational animals which were actuated by instincts of which we knew but little and could regulate only in a limited degree’, likening the evidence to testimony by ‘lunatics and persons in state of intoxication’.

South Africa’s courtroom ban was confirmed the following year by the newly formed Union’s top court. In this case, a dog had followed the footprints of a prowler to a nearby hostel, sniffed each of the eight occupants and then jumped onto the accused’s bed, barking at him. South Africa’s most feted jurist, Chief Justice James Rose Innes, pursued the opposite line of reasoning to Graham. The problem with tracker dogs was not their instinctive behaviour, Innes ruled, but rather their trained behaviour:

The habit of a dog to resent the entrance of a stranger at night, is independent of instruction or experience; it is based upon the instinct of self-preservation; and it is patent to our observation. But to draw inferences from the

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