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FROM
Jeffrey St. Clair,
CounterPunch
August 2018
In the spring of 1457, a gruesome murder took place in the French village
of Savigny-sur-Etang. A five-year-old boy had been killed and his body
partially consumed. A local family was accused of this frightful crime by
local residents who claimed to have witnessed the murder. The seven
suspects, a mother and her six children, were soon tracked down by local
authorities, who discovered them still stained by the boy’s blood. They were
arrested, indicted on charges of infanticide and held in the local jail for
trial.
The defendants were indigent and the court appointed a lawyer to represent
them. A few weeks later a trial was convened in Savigny’s seigneurial court.
Before a crowded room, witnesses were called. Evidence was presented and
legal arguments hotly debated. The justices considered the facts and the law
and rendered a verdict and a sentence. The mother was pronounced guilty and
ordered to be hanged to death by her legs from the limb of the gallows tree.
Her six children, however, received a judicial pardon. The court accepted
the defense lawyer’s argument that the youngsters lacked the mental
competence to have committed a crime in the eyes of the law. The orphaned
children were sent into custodial care at the expense of the state.
This is an interesting case to be sure, featuring important lessons about
the legal rights of the poor and the historic roots of juvenile justice in
western jurisprudence, lessons that seem entirely lost on our current
“tradition-obsessed” Supreme Court. But here’s the kicker: the defendants in
these proceedings were not members of our species. They were, it must be
said, a family of pigs.
The Savigny murder case, even in its ghastly particulars, was unexceptional.
In medieval Europe (and even colonial America) thousands of animals were
summoned to court and put on trial for a variety of offenses, ranging from
trespassing, thievery and vandalism to rape, assault and murder. The
defendants included cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, slugs, swallows, oxen,
horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, wolves, bears, bees, weevils, and termites.
These tribunals were not show trials or strange festivals like Fools Day.
The tribunals were taken seriously by both the courts and the community.
Though now largely lost to history, these trials followed the same
convoluted rules of legal procedure used in cases involving humans. Indeed,
as detailed in E. P. Evans’ remarkable book, The Criminal Prosecution and
Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), humans and animals were frequently
tried together in the same courtroom as co-conspirators, especially in cases
of bestiality. The animal defendants were appointed their own lawyers at
public expense. Animals enjoyed appeal rights and there are several
instances when convictions were overturned and sentences reduced or commuted
entirely. Sometimes, particularly in cases involving pigs, the animal
defendants were dressed in human clothes during court proceedings and at
executions.
Animal trials were held in two distinct settings: ecclesiastical courts and
secular courts. Ecclesiastical courts were the venue of choice for cases
involving the destruction of public resources, such as crops, or in crimes
involving the corruption of public morals, such as witchcraft or sexual
congress between humans and beasts. The secular and royal courts claimed
jurisdiction over cases where animals were accused of causing bodily harm or
death to humans or, in some instances, other animals.
When guilty verdicts were issued and a death sentence imposed, a
professional executioner was commissioned for the lethal task. Animals were
subjected to the same ghastly forms of torture and execution as were
condemned humans. Convicted animals were lashed, put to the rack, hanged,
beheaded, burned at the stake, buried alive, stoned to death and
drawn-and-quartered. In 14th century Sardinia, trespassing livestock had an
ear cut-off for each offense. In an early application of the
three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule, the third conviction resulted in
immediate execution.
The flesh of executed animals was never eaten. Instead, the corpses of the
condemned were either burned, dumped in rivers or buried next to human
convicts in graveyards set aside for criminals and heretics. The heads of
the condemned, especially in cases of bestiality, were often displayed on
pikes in the town square adjacent to the heads of their human
co-conspirators.
The first recorded murder trial involving an animal took place in 1266 at
Fontenay-aux-Roses (birthplace of the painter Pierre Bonnard) on the
outskirts of Paris. The case involved a murder of an infant girl. The
defendant was a pig. Though the records have been lost, similar trials
almost certainly date back to classical Greece, where, according to
Aristotle, secular trials of animals were regularly held in the great
Prytaneum of Athens.
Interestingly, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, written in 1269, is in
part an attack on Aristotle’s ideas and his “radical acolytes” who had
infiltrated the universities of thirteenth century Europe. In the Summa,
Aquinas laboriously tried to explain the theological basis for the trials of
animals.
While most of the animal trials, according the records unearthed by Evans,
appear to have taken place in France, Germany and Italy, nearly every
country in Europe seems to have put beasts on trial, including Russia,
Poland, Romania, Spain, Scotland and Ireland. Anglophiles have long claimed
that England alone resisted the idea of hauling cows, dogs and pigs before
the royal courts. But Shakespeare suggests otherwise. In “The Merchant of
Venice,” Portia’s friend, the young and impetuous Gratiano, abuses Shylock,
comparing him to a wolf that had been tried and hanged for murder:
Thy currish spirit
Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unhallow’d dam,
Infus’d itself in thee..
Even colonial Brazil got in on the act. In 1713 a rectory at the Franciscan
monastery in Piedade no Maranhāo collapsed, its foundation ravaged by
termites. The friars lodged charges against the termites and an
ecclesiastical inquest soon issued a summons demanding that the ravenous
insects appear before the court to confront the allegations against their
conduct. Often in such cases, the animals who failed to heed the warrant
were summarily convicted in default judgments. But these termites had a
crafty lawyer. He argued that the termites were industrious creatures,
worked hard and enjoyed a God-given right to feed themselves. Moreover, the
lawyer declared, the slothful habits of the friars had likely contributed to
the disrepair of the monastery. The monks, the defense lawyer argued, were
merely using the local termite community as an excuse for their own
negligence. The judge returned to his chambers, contemplated the facts
presented him and returned with a Solomonic ruling. The friars were
compelled to provide a woodpile for the termites to dine at and the insects
were commanded to leave the monastery and confine their eating to their new
feedlot.
A similar case unfolded in the province of Savoy, France in 1575. The
weevils of Saint Julien, a tiny hamlet in the Rhone Alps, were indicted for
the crime of destroying the famous vineyards on the flanks of Mount Cenis. A
lawyer, Pierre Rembaud, was appointed as defense counsel for the accused.
Rembaud wasted no time in filing a motion for summary judgment, arguing that
the weevils had every right to consume the grape leaves. Indeed, Rembaud
asserted, the weevils enjoyed a prior claim to the vegetation on Mount
Cenis, since, as detailed in the Book of Genesis, the Supreme Deity had
created animals before he fashioned humans and God had promised animals all
of the grasses, leaves and green herbs for their sustenance. Rembaud’s
argument stumped the court. As the judges deliberated, the villagers of
Saint Julien seemed swayed by the lawyer’s legal reasoning. Perhaps the bugs
had legitimate grievances. The townsfolk scrambled to set aside a patch of
open land away from the vineyards as a foraging ground for the weevils. The
land was surveyed. Deeds were drawn up and the property was shown to
counselor Rembaud for his inspection and approval. They called the weevil
reserve La Grand Feisse. Rembaud walked the site, investigating the plant
communities with the eyes of a seasoned botanist. Finally, he shook his
head. No deal. The land was rocky and had obviously been overgrazed for
decades. La Grand Feisse was wholly unsuitable for the discriminating
palates of his clients. If only John Walker Lindh had been appointed so
resolute an advocate!
The Perry Mason of animal defense lawyers was an acclaimed French jurist
named Bartholomew Chassenée, who later became a chief justice in the French
provincial courts and a preeminent legal theorist. One of Chassenée’s most
intriguing essays, the sixteenth-century equivalent of a law review article,
was titled De Excommunicatore Animalium Insectorium. In another legal
mongraph, Chassenée argued with persuasive force that local animals, both
wild and domesticated, should be considered lay members of the parish
community. In other words, the rights of animals were similar in kind to the
rights of the people at large.
In the summer of 1522, Chassenée was called to the ancient village of Autun
in Burgundy. The old town, founded during the reign of Augustus, had been
recently overrun by rats. French maidens had been frightened, the barley
crop destroyed, the vineyards placed in peril. The town crier issued a
summons for the rats to appear before the court. None showed. The judge
asked Chassenée why he should not find his clients guilty in absentia. The
lawyer argued that the rat population was dispersed through the countryside
and that his clients were almost certainly unaware of the charges pending
against them. The judge agreed. The town crier was dispatched into the
fields to repeat his urgent notice. Yet still the rats failed to appear at
trial. Once again Chassenée jumped into action. Showing tactical skills that
should impress Gerry Spence, Chassenée shifted his strategy. Now he
passionately explained to the court that the rats remained hidden in their
rural nests, paralyzed by the prospect of making a journey past the cats of
Autun, who were well-known for their ferocious animosity toward rodents.
In the end, the rats were spared execution. The judge sternly ordered them
to vacate the fields of Autun within six days. If the rats failed to heed
this injunction, the animals would be duly anathematized, condemned to
eternal torment. This sentence of damnation would be imposed, the court
warned, regardless of any rodent infirmities or pregnancies.
Few animal trials were prosecuted as vigorously as those involving
allegations of bestiality. In 1565, a man was indicted for engaging in
sexual relations with a mule in the French city of Montpelier. The mule was
also charged. Both stood trial together. They were duly convicted and
sentenced to death at the stake. Because of the mule’s angry disposition,
the animal was subjected to additional torments. His feet were chopped off
before the poor beast was pitched into the fire.
In 1598, the suspected sorceress Françoise Secretain was brought before the
inquisitional court at St. Claude in the Jura Mountains of Burgundy to face
charges of witchcraft and bestiality. Secretain was accused of communing
with the devil and having sex with a dog, a cat and a rooster. The
blood-curdling case is described in detail by her prosecutor, the Grand
Justice Henri Boguet, in his strange memoir Discours des Sorciers. Secretain
was stripped naked her cell, as the fanatical Boguet inspected her for the
mark of Satan. The animals were shaved and plucked for similar examinations.
Secretain and her pets were put to various tortures, including having a hot
poker plunged down their throats to see if they shed tears, for, as Boguet
noted in his memoir:
“All the sorcerers whom I have examined in quality of Judge have never shed
tears in my presence: or, indeed, if they have shed them it has been so
parsimoniously that no notice was taken of them. I say this with regard to
those who seemed to weep, but I doubt if their tears were not feigned. I am
at least well assured that those tears were wrung from them with the
greatest efforts. This was shown by the efforts which the accused made to
weep, and by the small number of tears which they shed.”
Alas, the poor woman and her animals did not weep. They perished together in
flames at the stake.
In 1642 a teenage boy named Thomas Graunger stood accused of committing, in
the unforgettable phrase of Cotton Mather, “infandous Buggeries” with farm
animals in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Young master Graunger was hauled before
an austere tribunal of Puritans headed by Gov. William Bradford. There he
stood trial beside his co-defendants, a mare, a cow, two goats, four sheep,
two calves and a turkey. All were found guilty. They were publicly tortured
and executed. Their bodies were burned on a pyre, their ashes buried in a
mass grave. Graunger was the first juvenile to be executed in colonial
America.
In 1750, a French farmer named Jacques Ferron was espied sodomizing a female
donkey in a field. Man and beast were arrested and hauled before a tribunal
in the commune of Vanves near Paris. After a day-long trial, Ferron was
convicted and sentenced to be burned at the stake. But the donkey’s lawyers
argued that their client was innocent. The defense maintained that the
illicit acts were not consensual. The donkey, the defense pleaded, was a
victim of rape and not a willing participant in carnal congress with Ferron.
Character witnesses were called to testify on the donkey’s behalf.
Affidavits calling for mercy were filed with the court by several leading
citizens of the town, including the head abbot at the local priory,
attesting to the benign nature and good moral character of the animal. The
abbot wrote that the four-year-old donkey was “in word and deed and in all
her habits of life a most honorable creature.” Here the court was compelled
to evaluate matters of volition, free will and resistance. In short, did the
donkey say no? After an intense deliberation, the court announced its
verdict. The donkey was acquitted and duly released back to its pasture.
What are we to make of all this? Why did both the secular and religious
courts of Europe devote so much time and money to these elaborate trials of
troublesome animals? Some scholars, such as James Frazer, argue that the
trials performed the function of the ancient rituals of sacrifice and
atonement. Others, such as the legal theorist Hans Kelsen, view the cases as
the last gasp of the animistic religions. Some have offered an economic
explanation suggesting that animals were tried and executed during times of
glut or seized in times of economic plight as property by the Church or
Crown through the rule of deodand or “giving unto God.” Still others have
suggested that the trials and executions served a public health function,
culling populations of farm animals and rodents that might contribute to the
spread of infectious diseases.
Our interest here, however, is not with the social purpose of the trials,
but in the qualities and rights the so-called medieval mind ascribed to the
defendants: rationality, premeditation, free will, moral agency, calculation
and motivation. In other words, it was presumed that animals acted with
intention, that they could be driven by greed, jealousy and revenge. Thus
the people of the Middle Ages, dismissed as primitives in many modernist
quarters, were actually open to a truly radical idea: animal consciousness.
As demonstrated in these trials, animals could be found to have mens rea, a
guilty mind. But the courts also seriously considered exculpatory evidence
aimed at proving that the actions of the accused, including murder, were
justifiable owing to a long train of abuses. In other words, if animals
could commit crimes, then crimes could also be committed against them.
The animal trials peaked in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth
centuries, then faded away. They came to be viewed through the lens of
modern historians as comical curiosities, grotesquely odd relics of the Dark
Ages. The legal scholar W. W. Hyde succinctly summed up the smug,
self-aggrandizing view of the legal scholars of the 20th century: “the
savage in his rage at an animal’s misdeeds obliterates all distinctions
between man and beast, and treats the latter in all respects as the former.”
Of course, the phasing out of animal trials didn’t mean that the cruel
treatment of domesticated animals improved or that problematic beasts
stopped being put to death in public extravaganzas. While the trials ceased,
the executions increased.
Recall the death warrant issued in 1903 against Topsy the Elephant, star of
the Forepaugh Circus at Coney Island’s Luna Park. Topsy had killed three
handlers in a three-year period. One of her trainers was a sadist, who
tortured the elephant by beating her with clubs, stabbing her with pikes and
feeding her lit cigarettes.
Tospy was ordered to be hanged, but then Thomas Edison showed up and offered
to electrocute Topsy. She was shackled, fed carrots laced with potassium
cyanide and jolted with 6,600 volts of alternating current. Before a crowd
of 1,500 onlookers, Topsy shivered, toppled and died in a cloud of dust.
Edison filmed the entire event. He titled his documentary short,
“Electrocuting the Elephant.”
Topsy received no trial. It was not even imagined that she had grievances, a
justification for her violent actions. Topsy was killed because she’d become
a liability. Her death was a business decision, pure and simple.
So what happened? How did animals come to be viewed as mindless commodities?
One explanation is that modernity rudely intruded in the rather frail form
of Renè Descartes. The great Cartesian disconnect not only cleaved mind from
body, but also severed humans from the natural world. Descartes postulated
that animals were mere physical automatons. They were biological machines
whose actions were driven solely by bio-physical instincts. Animals lacked
the power of cognition, the ability to think and reason. They had a brain
but no mind.
At Port-Royal the Cartesians cut up living creatures with fervor, and in the
words of one of Descartes’ biographers, “kicked about their dogs and
dissected their cats without mercy, laughing at any compassion for them and
calling their screams the noise of breaking machinery.” Across the Channel
Francis Bacon declared in the “Novum Organum” that the proper aim of science
was to restore the divinely ordained dominance of man over nature, “to
extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man and so to
endow him with “infinite commodities.” Bacon’s doctor, William Harvey, was a
diligent vivisector of living animals.
Thus did the great sages of the Enlightenment assert humanity’s ruthless
primacy over the Animal Kingdom. The materialistic view of history, and the
fearsome economic and technological pistons driving it, left no room for
either the souls or consciousness of animals. They were no longer our fellow
beings. They had been rendered philosophically and literally in resources
for guiltless exploitation, turned into objects of commerce, labor,
entertainment and food.
Conveniently for humans, the philosophers of the Industrial Age declared
that animal had no sense of their miserable condition. They could not
understand abuse, they had no conception of suffering, they could not feel
pain. When captive animals bit, trampled or killed their human captors, it
wasn’t an act of rebellion against abusive treatment but merely a reflex.
There was no need, therefore, to investigate the motivations behind these
violent encounters because there could be no premeditation at all on the
animal’s part. The confrontations could not be crimes. They were mere
accidents, nothing more.
One wonders what Descartes would have made of the group of orangutans, who
stole crowbars and screwdrivers from zookeepers in San Diego to repeatedly
break out of their enclosures? How’s that for cognition, cooperation and
tool use, Monsieur Descartes?
In 1668, Jean Racine, a playwright not known for his facility with farce,
wrote a comedy satirizing the trials of animals. Written eighteen years
after the death of Descartes, “Les Plaideurs” (The Litigants) tells the
story of a senile old man obsessed with judging, who eventually places the
family dog on trial for stealing a capon from the kitchen table. The mutt is
convicted and sentenced to death. Then the condemned canine’s lawyer makes a
last minute plea for mercy and reveals a litter of puppies before the judge.
The old man is moved and the harsh hand of justice is stayed.
Racine’s comedy, loosely based on Aristophanes’ “The Wasps,” bombed, playing
only two nights before closing, perhaps because the public had not yet been
convinced by the solons of Europe to fully renounce their kinship with
natural creatures. Revealingly, the play was resurrected a century later by
the Comedie-Française to packed houses. By then public attitudes toward
animals had shifted decisively in favor of human exceptionalism. According
some accounts, the play has now become the most frequently performed French
comedy, having been presented in more than 1,400 different productions.
Contrast Descartes’ sterile, homocentric view with that of a much great
intellect, Michel Montaigne. Writing a mere fifty years before Descartes,
Montaigne, the most gifted French prose stylist, declared: “We understand
them no more than they us. By the same token they may as well esteem us
beasts as we them.” Famously, he wrote in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”,
“When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than
she is to me?”. Montaigne was distressed by the barbarous treatment of
animals: “If I see but a chicken’s neck pulled off or a pig sticked, I
cannot choose but grieve; and I cannot well endure a silly dew-bedabbled
hare to groan when she is seized upon by the hounds.”
But the materialists held sway. Descartes was backed up the grim John
Calvin, who proclaimed that the natural world was a merely a material
resource to be exploited for the benefit of humanity, “True it is that God
hath given us the birds for our food,” Calvin declared. “We know he hath
made the whole world for us.”
John Locke, the father of modern liberal thinking, described animals as
“perfect machines” available for unregulated use by man. The animals could
be sent to the slaughterhouse with no right of appeal. In Locke’s coldly
utilitarian view, cows, goats, chickens and sheep were simply meat on feet.
Thus was the Great Chain of Being ruthlessly transmuted into an iron chain
with a manacle clasped round the legs and throats of animals, hauling them
off to zoos, circuses, bull rings and abattoirs.
Karl Marx, that supreme materialist, ridiculed the Romantic poets for their
“deification of Nature” and chastised Darwin for his “natural, zoological
way of thinking.” Unfortunately, Marx’s great intellect was not empathetic
enough to extend his concepts of division of labor, alienation and worker
revolt to the animals harnessed into grim service by the lords of capital.
By the 1930s, so Matt Cartmill writes in his excellent history of hunting, A
View to a Death in the Morning, “some Marxist thinkers urged that it was
time to put an end to nature and that animals and plants that serve no human
purpose ought to be exterminated.”
Marx liked to disparage his enemies by calling them baboons. But what would
Marx have made of the baboons of northern Africa, hunted down by animal
traders, who slaughtered nursing mother baboons and stole their babies for
American zoos and medical research labs. The baboon communities violently
resisted this risible enterprise, chasing the captors through the wilderness
all the way to the train station. Some of the baboons even followed the
train for more than a hundred miles and at distant stations launched raids
on the cars in an attempt to free the captives. How’s that for fearless
solidarity?
Fidel Castro, one of Marx’s most ardent political practitioners, reinvented
himself in his 80s as a kind of eco-guerilla, decrying the threat of global
warming and advocating green revolutions. Yet Castro likes nothing more than
to take visiting journalists to the Acuario Nacional de la Habana to watch
captive dolphins perform tricks. The cetaceans are kept in wretched
conditions, often trapped in waters so saturated with chlorine that it burns
ulcers in the skin and peels the corneas off the eyeballs. Cuba captures and
breeds dolphins for touring exhibitions and for sale to notoriously noxious
aquatic parks throughout South America. The captive dolphins in Havana are
trained by Celia Guevara, daughter of Che. There, as in other dolphin parks,
food is used as a weapon in the pitiless reconditioning of the brainy sea
mammals. Do the trick right or you don’t get fed. Is it any wonder then that
many captive dolphins have chosen to bite the hand that starves them?
In this respect, at least, Adam Smith comes out a little more humane than
the Marxists. Although he viewed animals as property, Smith recoiled at the
sight of the abattoir: “The trade of a butcher is a brutal and odious
business.”
Through the ages, it’s been the poets who have largely held firm in their
affinity with the natural world. Consider the Metamorphoses composed by the
Roman poet and political dissident Ovid around the time of Christ’s birth.
In the final book of this epic, where humans are routinely transformed into
animals, Ovid summons the spirit of Pythagoras. The great sage of Samos,
whom Aristotle hailed as the father of philosophy, gives the most important
speech in the poem. But the author of the famous Theorem forsakes the
opportunity to proclaim that mathematics is the foundation of nature.
Instead, Ovid’s Pythagoras denounces the killing of animals for food and
asserts the sanctity of all life forms.
“What evil they contrive, how impiously they prepare to shed human blood
itself, who rip at a calf’s throat with the knife, and listen unmoved to its
bleating, or can kill a kid goat to eat, that cries like a child, or feed on
a bird, that they themselves have fed! How far does that fall short of
actual murder? Where does the way lead on from there?”
Where indeed. To hell, perhaps? That’s what John Milton thought. Milton’s
God advises Adam that animals have the power of cognition and indeed they
“reason not contemptibly.”
Crusty Robert Burns tells a frightened field mouse:
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed similar fraternal sentiments to a donkey
chained in a field:
Poor Ass! thy master should have learnt to show Pity–
best taught by fellowship of Woe!
For much I fear me that He lives like thee,
Half famished in a land of Luxury!
How askingly its footsteps hither bend!
It seems to say, “And have I then one friend?”
Innocent foal! thou poor despised forlorn!
I hail thee Brother — spite of the fool’s scorn!
And fain would take thee with me, in the Dell
Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell…
Lord Byron objected to angling, saying it inflicted unnecessary pain on
trout, and ridiculed Izaak Walton for debasing poetry in promotion of this
“cruel” hobby. His Lordship would, no doubt, have been outraged by the inane
past-time of “catch-and-release” fishing.
Byron’s arch-nemesis William Wordsworth wrote a stunning poem titled
“Hart-Leap Well,” tracking the last moments in the life a mighty stag chased
“for thirteen hours” to its death by a horse-riding knight and his hounds.
The ballad closes with a stark denunciation of hunting for sport:
“This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell;
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.
“The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
…
“One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she [ie. Nature’ shows, and what conceals;
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”
The great, though mad, naturalist-poet John Clare openly worshipped “the
religion of the fields,” while William Blake, the poet of revolution, simply
said:
For every thing that lives is Holy,
Life delights in life.
And, finally, there is the glorious precedent of Geoffrey Chaucer, who
reveals himself to be an animal liberationist. In the “General Prologue” to
The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes the Prioress as a woman who cannot
abide the abuse of animals.
But for to speken of hir conscience,
She was so charitable and so pious
She wolde wepe, if that she sawe a mous
Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde.
Of smaule houndes hadde she that she fedde
With rosted flessh, or milk and wastel-breed.
But soore wepte she if oon of hem were deed,
Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte;
And al was conscience and tender herte.
Later in the remarkable “Tale of the Manciple,” Chaucer goes all the way,
arguing forcefully against the caging of wild songbirds. The English
language’s first great poet concludes that no matter how well you treat the
captives, the birds desire their freedom:
“Taak any bryd, and put it in a cage,
And do al thyn entente and thy corage
To fostre it tendrely with mete and drynke,
Of alle deyntees that thou kanst bithynke;
And keepe it al so clenly as thou may,
Although his cage of gold be nevere so gay,
Yet hath this bryd, by twenty thousand foold,
Levere in a forest that is rude and coold
Goon ete wormes, and swich wrecchednesse;
For evere this bryd wol doon his bisynesse
To escape out of his cage, whan he may.
His libertee this brid desireth ay.”
It would take the philosophers nearly six hundred years to catch up with
Chaucer’s enlightened sentiments. In 1975, the Australian Peter Singer
published his revolutionary book Animal Liberation. Singer demolished the
Cartesian model that treated animals as mere machines. Blending science and
ethics, Singer asserted that most animals are sentient beings, capable of
feeling pain. The infliction of pain was both unethical and immoral. He
argued that the progressive credo of providing “the greatest good for the
greatest number” should be extended to animals and that animals should be
liberated from their servitude in scientific labs, factory farms, circuses
and zoos.
A quarter century after the publication of Animal Liberation, Peter Singer
revisited the great taboo of bestiality in an essay titled “Heavy Petting.”
Expressing sentiments that would have shocked Grand Inquisitor Boguet,
Singer argued that sexual relations between humans and animals should not
automatically be considered acts of abuse. According to Singer, it all comes
down to the issue of harm. In some cases, Singer suggested, animals might
actually feel excitement and pleasure in such inter-species couplings. Even
for the most devoted animal rights advocates this might be taking E. O.
Wilson’s concept of biophilia a little too literally.
In Fear of the Animal Planet, historian Jason Hribal takes a radical, but
logical, step beyond Singer. Hribal reverses the perspective and tells the
story of liberation from the animals’ points-of-view.
This is history written from the end of the chain, from inside the cage,
from the depths of the tank. Hribal’s chilling investigation travels much
further than Singer dared to go. For Hribal, the issue isn’t merely harm and
pain, but consent. The confined animals haven’t given their permission to be
held captive, forced to work, fondled or publicly displayed for profit.
Hribal skillfully excavates the hidden history of captive animals as active
agents in their own liberation. His book is a harrowing, and curiously
uplifting, chronicle of resistance against some of the cruelest forms of
torture and oppression this side of Abu Ghraib prison.
Hribal takes us behind the scenes of circus and the animal park, exposing
methods of training involving sadistic forms of discipline and punishment,
where elephants and chimps are routinely beaten and terrorized into
submission.
We witness from the animals’ perspective the tyrannical trainers, creepy
dealers in exotic species, arrogant zookeepers and sinister hunters, who
slaughtered the parents of young elephants and apes in front of their young
before they captured them. We are taken inside the cages, tents and tanks,
where captive elephants, apes and sea mammals are confined in wretched
conditions with little medical care.
All of this is big business, naturally. Each performing dolphin can generate
more than a million dollars a year in revenue, while orcas can produce
twenty times that much.
This is a history of violent resistance to such abuses. Here are stories of
escapes, subterfuges, work stoppages, gorings, rampages, bitings, and, yes,
revenge killings. Each trampling of a brutal handler with a bull-hook, each
mauling of a taunting visitor, each drowning of a tormenting trainer is a
crack in the old order that treats animals as property, as engines of
profit, as mindless objects of exploitation and abuse. The animal rebels are
making their own history and Jason Hribal serves as their Michelet.
Hribal’s heroic profiles in animal courage show how most of these violent
acts of resistance were motivated by their abusive treatment and the
miserable conditions of their confinement. These animals are far from
mindless. Their actions reveal memory not mere conditioning, contemplation
not instinct, and, most compellingly, discrimination not blind rage. Again
and again, the animals are shown to target only their abusers, often taking
pains to avoid trampling bystanders. Animals, in other words, acting with a
moral conscience.
So let us now praise infamous animals.
Consider the case of Jumbo the Elephant, the world’s most famous animal.
Captured in eastern Africa in 1865, Jumbo would become the star attraction
of P.T. Barnums’ Circus. Jumbo earned millions for his owners, but he was
treated abysmally for most of his brief life. The giant pachyderm was
confined to a small compartment with a concrete floor that damaged his feet
and caused his joints to become arthritic. He was trained using unspeakably
brutal methods, he was shackled in leg-chains, jabbed with a lance, beaten
with ax handles, drugged and fed beer to the point of intoxication. He was
endlessly shipped back-and-forth across the country on the circuses train
and made to perform two shows a day, six days a week. At the age of 24 Jumbo
was finally fed up. He could tolerate it no more. On a September night in
Ontario, Jumbo and his sidekick, the small elephant called Thom Thumb, broke
free from their handlers and wondered away from the tent and towards the
train tracks. As P.T. Barnum later told the story, Jumbo pushed his pal Thom
Thumb safely off the tracks and tried to ram an oncoming train. After Jumbo
died an autopsy was performed. He stomach contents reviled numerous metallic
objects that he had been fed over the years, including keys, screws, bolts,
pennies and nickels–his reward for entertain hundreds of thousands of
people.
Tatiana the Tiger, confined for years in a small enclosure at the San
Francisco Zoo, finally reached her limit after being tormented by three
teenaged boys on Christmas day 2006. She leapt the twelve-foot high wall,
snatched one of the lads in her paws and eviscerated him. She stalked the
zoo grounds for the next half-hour, by-passing many other visitors, until
she tracked down the two other culprits and mauled them both before being
gunned down by police.
There is Ken the Orangutan who pelted an intrusive TV news crew with his own
shit from his enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.
Moe the Chimpanzee, an unpaid Hollywood actor who, when he wasn’t working,
was locked in a tiny cage in West Covina. Moe made multiple escapes and
fiercely resisted his recapture. He bit four people and punched at least one
police officer. After his escape, he was sent off to a miserable confinement
at a dreary place called Jungle Exotics. Moe escaped again, this time into
the San Bernadino Mountains, where’s he’s never been heard from since.
Speaking of Hollywood, let’s toast the memory of Buddha the Orangutan (aka
Clyde), who co-starred with Clint Eastwood in the movie Every Which Way But
Loose. On the set, Buddha simply stopped working one day. He refused to
perform his silly routines any more and his trainer repeatedly clubbed him
in the head with a hard cane in front of the crew. One day near the end of
filming Buddha, like that dog in Racine’s play, snatched some doughnuts from
a table on the set. The ape was seized by his irate keeper, taken back his
cage and beaten to death with an ax handle. Buddha’s name was not listed in
the film’s credits.
Tyke the Elephant was captured in the savannahs of Zimbabwe and shipped to
the United States to work in a traveling circus, where she was routinely
disciplined with a sharp hook called an ankus. After 20 years of captivity
and torture, Tyke reached her tipping point one day in Honolulu. During the
elephant routine under the Big Top, Tyke made her break. She smashed through
the railings of the ring and dashed for the exits. She chased after circus
clowns and handlers, over-turned cars, busted through a gate and ran onto
the streets of Honolulu. She was gunned down, while still wearing her
rhinestone tiara.
Then there is the story of Tilikum the orca. When he was two, Tilikum was
rudely seized from the frigid waters of the North Atlantic off the coast of
Iceland. The young killer whale was shipped to Vancouver Island, where he
was forced to perform tricks at an aquatic theme park called Sealand.
Tilikum was also pressed into service as a stud, siring numerous calves for
exploitation by his captors. Tilikum shared his small tank with two other
orcas, Nootka and Haida. In February 1991, the whales’ female trainer
slipped and fell into the tank. The whales wasted no time. The woman
grabbed, submerged repeatedly, and tossed her back and forth between the
three whales until she drowned. At the time of the killing, Haida was
pregnant with a calf sired by Tilikum
Eight years later, a 27-year-old man broke into the aquatic park, stripped
off his clothes and jumped into the tank with Tilikum. The orca seized the
man, bit him sharply and flung him around. He was found floating dead in the
pool the next morning. The authorities claimed the man died of hypothermia.
In 2010, Tilikum was a star attraction at Sea World in Orlando. During an
event called “Dining With Shamu,” Tilikum snatched his trainer, Dawn
Brancheau, and dragged her into the pool, where, in front of horrified
patrons, he pinned her to the bottom until she drowned to death. The whale
had delivered his third urgent message.
Tilikum is the Nat Turner of the captives of Sea World. He has struck
courageous blows against the enslavement of wild creatures. Now it is up to
us to act on his thrust for liberation and build a global movement to smash
forever these aquatic gulags from the face of the Earth.
This essay is adapted from the introduction to Fear of the Animal Planet by Jason Hribal.
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WESTCHESTER4GEESE is an adjunct of ANIMAL DEFENDERS OF WESTCHESTER. We advocate against all forms of animal abuse and exploitation, including hunting, experimentation, fur, circuses and rodeos - https://www.facebook.com/Westchester4Geese