Crime and Animals
A popular notion of the criminality of animals has been prevalent in the past and still exists today, which should be noted in passing. This belief is that animals are morally responsible for their acts, and that consequently when an animal does injury to human beings it should be punished in much the same way as if it were a human being. As a result of this belief, during the Middle Ages and earlier many animals were tried and convicted for alleged crimes against human beings. Various penalties were inflicted, the most frequent one perhaps being capital punishment. Curiously enough, this notion was sometimes extended to the plant world as well, so that plants also were held morally responsible for their alleged acts towards man. Several things should be noted with respect to this notion. In the first place, it is evident that this belief arises out of an anthropomorphic interpretation of the animal and plant worlds. Man has assumed that animals and even plants think, and feel, and will like himself, and that therefore their acts should be treated like the acts of human beings. In the second place, in most if not all of these cases the animals were punished for their offenses against men. In fact, I do not know of a single case where an animal was punished by judicial process for an offense committed against a congener or a member of any other non-human species. While this may have been desirable from the human point of view, it was hardly fair to these animals. If you have enjoyed reading about crime, then you will like to know more about the real life work that detectives do. I have written an article about how to find person phone details using the internet.