Hanging Animals for Their Crimes?

Modern law scoffs at the suggestion that animals have legal rights. That wasn't always the case, as Ben Schreckinger at Slate notes:

“The notion of animals taking their human captors to court is at least a millennium old, first set down in writing by a brotherhood of dissident Sunni scholars in 10th-century Iraq. More strikingly, the actual practice of trying animals as defendants in court dates back to at least ancient Athens, and it was common practice in Europe into the 18th century.

The history of animals on and at trial, in both thought and deed, is more than just a curiosity. It serves as a reminder that human attitudes toward animals are anything but fixed, and that the current legal paradigm, in which animals are property, is as much a historical curiosity as older systems for treating them.

For hundreds of years, European animals were regularly tried in court for their alleged misdeeds. Ecclesiastical courts went after rodents and other pests for damaging crops. The locusts, serpents, weevils, rats and flies tried before these courts weren’t just liable to damages and banishment, but also excommunication. Civil criminal courts, meanwhile, tried livestock for violence against human victims. Judging by surviving records, pigs were particularly fond of killing babies, and at least one such pig was dressed in human clothing for her 1386 hanging — raising the question of whether something can be “adorably macabre.” And of course there were the bestiality trials, in which both parties to the coupling faced prosecution.