Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought

3. Agency, Vulnerability, and Societas: Toward a Levinasian Politics of the Animal

41 THREE Agency, Vulnerability, and Societas Toward a Levinasian Politics of the Animal DougHalls Inhisworkof1906,TheCriminalProsecutionandCapitalPunishment of Animals, E. P. Evans examines dozens of legal trials held before lay and ecclesiastical courts of medieval Europe against various kinds of animals, insects, and even plants. At issue was their culpability in an assortment of “crimes” against human society, such as the destruction ofcropsorthekillingoforinjurytoothers.Thecasesareasvariedasthey are, perhaps, strange. In 1394, a pig living in the French commune of Mortaign was hung after sacrilegiously eating a consecrated wafer.1 In 1451, the bishop of Lausanne, Switzerland, expelled from the waters of Lac Léman a population of bloodsuckers, who had become so prodigious that they threatened to destroy the lake’s stock of salmon.2 In 1487, at the behest of the local clergy, the residents of Autun carried out a three-day procession to forewarn the region’s slugs of their anathematization for corrupting its herb gardens.3 J. J. Finkelstein, in “The Ox That Gored,” also mentions a case from Autun, in the sixteenth century, against some rats who had destroyed a crop of barley. The jurist Chassenée, appointed to defend the rats, was able to have the trial endlessly deferred by citing the court’s inability to guarantee the rodents’ safe passage to trial, due to the number of cats in the vicinity of the courthouse.4 In Finkelstein’s text we also receive an odd, if not unsettling image of a pig who, in 1386, after being convicted 42 Doug Halls of mangling a child, was executed, but only after it was dressed in human clothing.5 And, in the eight-volume work of jurisprudence, Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du Jurisconsulte, P. J. de Mat cites a trial held in 1525 in Toulouse involving a woman and her dog, who were both convicted and hung on the gallows before being burned on the pyre. The dog had been deemed the woman’s “accomplice” in her crime, but specifics about the offence itself are long lost. Yet that does not mean that the complete records were merely misplaced. Sometimes, crimes involving “animal sin” were considered so atrocious that the detailed court proceedings were thrown onto the flames along with the convicted in order to erase the memory of the events.6 These are hardly historical oddities. Ancient Mesopotamia’s Code of Hammurabi includes a series of ordinances about punishing oxen—and their owners—that gore human beings and other animals .7 The book of Exodus, similarly, includes several laws about the responsibility human owners have for bulls who injure others or damage property (e.g., Exod. 21:28). Pliny the Elder writes of a battle between humans and elephants staged by the Roman leader Pompey. The elephants, seeming to perceive their danger, appeared to entreat the crown with contortions that bewailed their plight and lamentation while the audience, according to Cicero, cursed Pompey for the injustice, feeling that the elephants had demonstrated societas—or commonality—with human beings.8 It goes without saying that animals remain serious subject matter in law and politics today. In the Grizzly Bear Management Plan for Southwestern Montana (2002), the local bears are afforded certain legally enforceable rights, due to them in part, the document says, because of the way that human practices have depreciated their habitat and contributed to their endangered status.9 In certain jurisdictions of the United States, divorce quarrels over domestic pets are sometimes resolved with the aid of animal psychologists, who attempt to discern the “enforceable preferences” of the pet, a procedure modeled on child-custody legislation.10 In the winter of 2010 in Switzerland, voters considered a proposal to establish a state-subsidized network of lawyers to represent animals in court: a suggestion that is not as radically progressive as it might seem, given Chassenée’s legal function from several centuries ago.11 Agency, Vulnerability, and Societas 43 Examples like these demonstrate the extent to which animals have long been, and continue to be, taken seriously in matters of justice. Yet such an observation, in and of itself, is perhaps not so remarkable: there are countless grassroots organizations, governmental agencies, and international coalitions that attempt to give political and legal representation to plants and animals, habitats and ecosystems, soils and seas. But some of these examples bespeak the less obvious as well: that issues of justice often entangle animal fates together with our own...