Did you know? France used to put animals in the dock

The French justice system used to put animals on trial. 

Trials were mostly organised by the Catholic church during the Middle Ages, before fading away slowly as France shifted toward the Enlightenment period. Cats, pigs, goats, sows, roosters, cows, caterpillars, slugs, rats, grasshoppers and even dolphins were tried, historical documents confirm, mostly from the 14th to the 17th Centuries. 

“Animals were treated like real criminals. They were imprisoned while awaiting trial, much like human beings,” said Laurent Litzenburger, a Phd professor at the Centre de Recherche Universitaire Lorrain d’Histoire, who has written several books on the subject. 

The church considered that, as animals were created by God like human beings, they should face either civil or ecclesiastical justice.

Michel Pastoureau, a French Phd historian, expert on the Middle Ages and former director of studies at the l’Ecole pratique des hautes études from 1982 à 2016, found 60 traces of such trials in historical documents, though more could have taken place. 

Phd Pastoureau listed three types of trial. The first ones, the most common, were accidents caused by animals or pets, graded in gravity from degradation to death. The most famous death by an animal was Philippe, 15, son of Louis VI of France and heir to the throne, who died after he fell from his horse after a pig walked in front of it in 1131. There is no trace of a trial as to what happened to the pig. 

Pigs represented 90% of the convicted animals. It was the first animal to be tried in 1266 in Paris and the most famous documented case was the trial of a pig in Falaise (Normandy) in 1386 who ate the limbs and the face of a child, who subsequently died. The pig was later sentenced to death. 

In other cases, there was a cat which choked a newborn child in Bar-le-Duc (Meuse) in 1467 and a bull that killed a man in Sainte-Barbe (Moselle) in 1512. 

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The second type were trials for zoophilia (a paraphilia in which a person experiences a sexual fixation on non-human animals). 

The third type were trials for what were called ‘organised animals’ which are now called pests. These included rats, caterpillars, grasshoppers, slugs and locusts. They were deemed responsible for the destruction of cattle herds and deemed to have been sent by either Satan or God to punish humans on earth. 

Barthélemy de Chasseneuz was one figure who rose to fame under that era of justice. A critic of such trials, he defended rats during a famous case in 1510, although its reality is debated by historians. 

Traces of that period remain in several art forms; gargoyles on churches such as on Sainte-Trinité’s church in Falaise, paintings, engravings such as L’homme et la Bête from Arthur Mangin in 1872, or illuminated manuscripts. 

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Most recently, animal trials featured in the plot of Les Chèvres! (English title, This Is the Goat!) a poorly received French-Belgian comedy released in February 2024 that saw two lawyers battling over the responsibility of a goat in the death of a gentleman.