Let’s put those pigs on trial, and then that tree: Timeless tales of human stupidity
First, this:
In The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), E.P. Evans listed 37 prosecutions of swine between the ninth and nineteenth centuries. A few examples: In 1266, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, a pig convicted of having eaten a child was publicly burned by order of the monks of Sainte Genevieve. In 1394, a pig was found guilty of “having killed and murdered a child in the parish of Roumaygne, in the county of Mortaing, for which deed the said pig was condemned to be haled and hanged by Jehan Petit, lieutenant of the bailiff.”
Etcetera, etcetera. The Middle Ages really was a fun place to be - if you weren’t a pig. Or a woman. Or a Jew. Or anyone being vaguely human.
Not that things have changed all that much. When it comes to being mind-bogglingly stupid, primitive, superstitious and what have you, the human animal hasn’t evolved much since it dropped from those first trees.
Like the following New Zealand blokes, for whom this great line by Carlos Ruiz Zafón could be written, ‘One of those people who fall off the tree and never quite reach the ground.’ Which comes from his marvellous book ‘The Shadow of the Wind’, by the way.
Back to those New Zealand clowns though - be it more than a bit reluctantly:
Three drunken men carried out an axe attack on a tree they blamed for a car crash that killed a friend, a court was told yesterday. Harry James Hayward Swain, 23, Paul James Ashby, 22, and Zac Lance Pearsey, 24, meat worker, pleaded guilty in Gore District Court yesterday to intentionally damaging the Gore District Council-owned tree on November 25 last year.
The attack was carried out just over 12 hours after talented rugby player Jeremy Cowan was killed when the car he was a passenger in hit the tree in Gore’s main street, The Southland Times reported. Police prosecutor Sergeant Grant Gerken said the men hacked out a hole 20cm to 30cm wide and 10cm deep in the tree.
They told police they thought the tree was responsible for their friend’s death.
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May 8th, 2008 at 14:51
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