Hayop ah!

Another kind of climate change is happening and it is in our social life. Politics to me, across the ages, especially in our country has been, for the most part, so reliably absurd that I have never found it interesting as I do other things. But most unfortunately, politics feeds the kind of society we have – in our attitudes towards each other, in the fears we have of each other, and even in our thresholds for basic decency.

For some tragically inexplicable reason, we let our supposedly grown-up government officials get away with the cursing, lying, grandstanding, stealing, killing, and false bravado that we would punish our own children for.  So now, it is a more common scene to see minors being punished in the news than grown-up officials of the land being accountable for their actions. Bizarrely enough, we now hold our children to be the examples to the mad men and women, especially in public life.

So do we all just all throw in the towel and surrender to this seemingly grand reversal of things? Maybe not if we knew or remembered the other instances in human history where our fellow human beings temporarily resorted to a total submission to nonsensical cruelty.  Strangely enough, this is where I found solace. That one day, we will all come out of this temporary numbness and paralysis because there have been worst instances in the past where humans seemed like they were in their lowest when it came to being rational but was able to come out of it. I am talking about a very strange part of history sometime in the 14th century when people started putting animals on trial, complete with prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges and executioners.

In a scholarly article by Sonya Vatomsky, she put together the highlights of literature that recorded the most glaring cases in the Middle Ages of animals actually being tried for cases as murder, crop damage, injuries to humans and even against God. These involved animals that included but were not limited to dogs, pigs, snails, rats and various kinds of insects. For the swarms of insects that caused crops to fail, they (the insects) were even tried and consequently excommunicated (although it was not known as to how the insects felt about this religious banishment.)

In the trials of the larger animals such as dogs, pigs, rats and wolves, historians have noted that the trials observed “proper procedure”. This “proper procedure” meant that the same court employees, including the professional hangman, who carried out human trials were the same ones recruited to carry out the animal trials and the execution. This “proper procedure” of course, evaded the most basic fact that animals have no appreciation for the rules of humankind, especially when it comes to what they will regard as food. But this little detail of course did not stop humans in the Middle Ages to passionately pursue these trials against these animals. The article even mentioned at the onset that we would still have the image of a specific trial of a pig in the form a church fresco had it not been carelessly washed away in the 1800’s.  The other drawings in the article will make you think they were Disney storyboard sketches if you did not know what the article was about.

But wait, there’s more. Because the other kinds of animals came in swarms that humans could not put on trial, they summoned the Church to excommunicate them in some sort of what the article called “religious pesticide”. This religious trial is worth very word its description if only to make you have your laugh of the day or as I originally intended, to make you feel that we as humans have been through worse before but we somehow came out of it.

The procedure outlined by the writer calls for a complaint against the insects lodged by someone claiming to have been aggrieved by the insects. And to ensure fair representation, an advocate for the insects would also be appointed. Now comes the point where it gets really tricky. Summons would be read of course in a “loud and solemn voice” in the places that the pests “frequented”. And yes, the pests were given 3 opportunities to appear in court to plead their case. And for some reason that did not seem to surprise the court officials then, the pests did not show up in court. In which case, the religious court officials will come down with the most severe sanction for the pests: excommunication. This was before the Renaissance so no scientific minded person thought of figuring out whether excommunicating pests really deterred pests from doing the same “crime” again.

One historian enlightened this very dim-witted (if not altogether dark) episode in human history by giving it this perspective. He said that the later part of the Middle Ages was an age of crisis, where officials felt that they had to give people a sense of order. In other words, that gave officials an excuse to resort to extreme, and obviously outrageously dumb measures such as the animal trials to give a semblance that they are in control. I guess as far as the officials were concerned, an all-out-war against criminally-minded animals was the end-all, be-all solution to “world” peace. Sounds creepily familiar?

The fact that there are no longer animal trials around should give us hope that one day, our living nightmare of political absurdity and our own inexplicable tolerance for it, would end and we will eventually wake up to the best of ourselves. Most recent science news say we are still somehow evolving so as long as we can still change, there is hope. Let us just make sure we make “better mistakes” than the ones we made when we sentenced animals for their crimes against humanity. – Rappler.com