Scapegoat by Charlie Campbell

Author:Charlie Campbell [CAMPBELL, CHARLIE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS054000, SOC031000
ISBN: 9781468300154
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE LITERAL SCAPEGOAT

Seldom has human intelligence been so wasted as when animals have been put on trial. Animals have commonly featured in sacrifices, and were used in various ways to carry away blame, in rituals such as that on the Jewish Day of Atonement and with Tyndale’s scapegoat. But there were also occasions when the creatures were themselves blamed for the disaster, being promoted from expiatory victim to nominal culprit. And so they found themselves in the dock, charged with crimes entirely beyond their comprehension, in trials that resembled more a chimps’ tea party than any serious judicial process.

There were two principal kinds of trial. The first was more like our own criminal trial, where an individual beast was accused of a specific offence – these have always been around and still happen today in one form or another. Animals in the service of man could be put on trial as if they were any other member of the household – horses, dogs, any domestic livestock, all could find themselves in the dock. In this respect they were given the same legal status as a human. There was an old German law that stipulated that all domestic animals should be treated as accessories to any crime committed in the house. This was at a time when superstition sometimes led people to bury a dead thief’s fingers under a newly built house to protect it from theft. There are also stories of animals being put on the rack to extort confessions, though this does seem unlikely, even by the standards of the day. It would have been done to observe the proper letter of the law rather than in any actual expectation of obtaining testimony.

An animal charged with homicide would be executed just like any human.39 In Falaise, Normandy, in 1386 a sow was charged with killing an infant, having torn its face and arms. The pig was sentenced to be ‘mangled and maimed in the head and forelegs,’ echoing the wounds it had inflicted on its victim, after which it was dressed in men’s clothing and executed in the town square. There used to be a painting of this scene in the town church there, but it was whitewashed over in 1820; we only have an engraving of it now to remind us of this landmark in human justice. There are other cases of pigs put on trial and sentenced to be buried alive for having eaten small children – in Amiens in 1463 and in Saint-Quentin in 1557 – or burned in public, as happened in Paris in 1266.

This grotesque theatre was in some way supposed to slake the public’s thirst for justice. But there was also the extraordinary idea that animals might be deterred from violence by seeing one of their own kind put to death and its corpse placed on view. This was believed by Hieronymus Rosarius, envoy to Pope Clement VII, who described how in Africa lions were crucified and placed near towns. There were also

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