194 MORAL RESPONSIBILITY. 



animal crime by human tribunals. The accountability of other 

 animals for their acts, when these acts injuriously affected 

 man, was the basis of numerous trials by the earliest human 

 lawgivers, who judged and punished animals for crimes or 

 misdemeanours just as they did man himself. Human laws, 

 ancient and modern, practically acknowledge animal respon- 

 sibility in animal crime. Thus the old Jewish law, as given 

 in Exodus (xxi. 28-32), punishes an ox by stoning to death 

 that fatally gores a man or a woman, and not the master to 

 whom it belongs, unless the animal was by habit and re- 

 pute vicious and he took no means to prevent accident to 

 man from its viciousness. ' A horse whose master had 

 taught him many tricks was tried at Lisbon in 1601, found 

 guilty of being possessed by the Devil, and was burnt' 

 (Draper). In more modern times the shepherd's dog has 

 repeatedly been condemned to death and executed in Scot- 

 land for sheep- stealing (Low). 



Animal responsibility was apparently recognised also in 

 the baptism of animals in the thirteenth century (Pierquin), 

 as it has been in admitting them as witnesses at law in 

 human courts of justice. Dogs have appeared as witnesses 

 in murder cases not only in the Middle Ages (Pierquin), but 

 so recently as 1872 in Dundee; and their evidence has not 

 unfrequently been accepted as conclusive for instance, in 

 the detection and recognition of murderers. 



Moral responsibility seems, moreover, to be involved in 

 at least many of the practical jokes practised, either on each 

 other or on man, by the lower animals. In the cases re- 

 ferred to, as is more fully pointed out in the chapter on 

 * Practical Jokes,' there is deliberate malice or intentional 

 mischief, self-amusement at the expense of another or the 

 gratification of revenge or other passions, a perfect know- 

 ledge of results, a cruel glorying in the sufferings of fellows. 

 When a parrot deliberately, for its own delectation, sets a 

 cat and a dog by the ears, or causes a whole party of tra- 

 vellers to stop a railway train and get out to look for a 

 child that was supposed to have fallen under the wheels, or 

 makes a servant maid or waiter attend to a fancied sum- 

 mons from a master or lodger, the animal must be held as, 



