Crime and Fur

In 1457, a sow was tried, convicted, and executed for homicide in a French court. In 1474, a rooster was burned at the stake in Basel for the crime of laying an egg. In 1924, a dog was assigned a prisoner number and sentenced to life in a Pennsylvania penitentiary.

These are not legends. These are documented facts, preserved in court records, ecclesiastical archives, and notarial documents that have survived for centuries.

Crime and Fur: True Stories of Animals on Trial examines eighteen of the most extraordinary legal proceedings in history - cases in which animals were formally charged, tried, defended by lawyers, convicted, acquitted, exiled, and executed by the legal institutions of their time. From medieval France to colonial Brazil, from the Kingdom of Ayutthaya to the Sultanate of Oman, from a Puritan courtroom in Salem to a Franciscan convent in Recife - the cases span six centuries, three continents, and legal traditions as different from each other as the animals that stood before their courts.

Every case in this book is real. Every verdict was recorded. Every document exists.

What drove human societies to put animals on trial? What does it reveal about the legal systems, the theological frameworks, and the collective psychology of the communities that produced these proceedings? And what do these cases - absurd, solemn, meticulously documented - tell us about the boundary between human justice and the natural world?

Crime and Fur is history at its most strange and most human.