musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Tales told by idiots?


I am as much a part of Nature as Nature is a part of me, but each of us plays a different role depending upon the script I think. And yet, although Macbeth thought that each of us was but a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, the player does not disappear; it may be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but fortunately their significance is far from nothing.

There are so many plays, so many words about how we decide to enact our roles, that choosing can be difficult and fraught with accusations of favoritism, politics, or even naïveté. Still, opting for one does not necessarily preclude another -we can watch many versions. We are eclectic creatures; it is acceptable to have divided loyalties.

One problem however, is perhaps juridical: do the ethics relevant to one Magisterium necessarily obtain in another? If an animal is granted some of the same rights we would apply to a human, should it also share the same constraints on behaviour as the rest of us? Should there be similar penalties for infractions? Trees, one might suspect, would be exempt from behavioural expectations, and yet what about animals? Do our laws obtain, or do theirs (if one stretches the analogy)? If there is a law -or perhaps an expectation- that dogs for example, should not suffer needlessly at our hands no matter the excuse, then is the obverse also true: that we should not suffer from their actions? Should it be the same sauce for the goose as for the gander?

I suspect that if push came to shove, the law would favour the human -after all, we wrote the laws. So, just how far should animal ‘rights’ extend? How far should we push the ‘We are all a part of Nature’ thing…? The question extends far back in time, as demonstrated in many fables like, say, Puss in Boots, or The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. These folktales, have long promoted a type of general wisdom that understands that animals and humanity are not so different. Within these archetypal stories, such animals speak across chasms of human-animal experience of a past when we didn’t see such creatures as irrevocably different from us.[i]

Many aboriginal cultures seem to have recognized a kinship with the Nature in which they were immersed, but seldom were their colonizers as convinced; I was fascinated to learn of occasional exceptions in French law though. In 16th century Burgundy, a lawyer (and later a parliamentary representative for Dijon) Barthélemy de Chasseneuz, won an acquittal on behalf of a group of rats put on trial for eating through the province’s barley crop in 1522. Apparently he was forced to employ all sorts of legal shifts and chicane, dilatory pleas and other technical objections, including the argument that the rats couldn’t be forced to take the stand because their lives were at risk from the feral cats in the town of Autun. He hoped to find some loophole in the meshes of the law through which the accused might escape.[ii]

But simply dismissing animal trials as a practice of a primitive time imposes a confusing presentism on the past, and ignores different ways of understanding nonhuman consciousness, and the rights that the natural world deserves. Although things are changing, progress has been slow, however. The ever intriguing French philosopher Michel Foucault, felt that premodern legal proceedings were not necessarily intended to reduce crime, or even to punish, but that they were better understood as as being among the ceremonies by which power was manifested. In trying a group of rats for eating crops, there was never an assumption that the rodents would somehow learn their lesson, for the trial wasn’t held for them, but rather for the humans who witnessed the spectacle.[iii]

Still, the idea that an animal could even be put on trial for something suggests an embryonic awareness that it might possess powers of reason and intentionality which could be legally explored. After all, according to Evans [Edward Payson Evans, an American linguist whose book The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906) remains the standard work on the subject] medieval peasants  regarded domestic animals as members of the household and entitled to the same legal protection as human vassals, and before the Enlightenment, animals were ‘invested with human rights and inferentially endowed with human responsibilities’.

As children mature, I wonder if they, too, progress through the same intellectual stages. Long before my varnish had been applied, I remember a trial of sorts my friends and I held in the snow-clogged lane behind my house in 1950ies Winnipeg. A group of us were heading for Eccles Street where the snowdrifts had been piled high along the road so its little bus could struggle along -redoubts for snowball-fighting six year olds.

Just before we reached the street, my best friend Jamie noticed a cat playing with something lying on the snow. It was his cat, so he grabbed it while it was toying with a little bird lying motionless on the snow. Alan, who had never liked cats, was outraged.

“Your cat should be punished for that, Jamie,” he said as he kneeled down on the snow and gently cradled the bird in his mittens. But just as he said that, the bird opened one eye, assessed the situation and then, no longer seeing the cat, promptly flew away.

Jamie shrugged, and put the cat down. “It’s what cats do, Al; they’re hunters like lions and tigers…”

Alan was far from satisfied, however. “But they’re not lions, or anything; you feed him at home, don’t you? I mean he doesn’t have to hunt to eat does he?”

“He didn’t eat it though, did he? The bird was just pretending it was dead, so it can’t be a crime can it?”

Alan puzzled over the logic for a moment. “But maybe that was only because we stopped him before he had a chance to eat it.”

“You still shouldn’t punish somebody for something they didn’t do, though, Alan.” He thought about it for a second. “It’d be like sending me to my room for only looking at the pie my mother just took out of the oven…”

That stumped Alan, but only briefly. “But the cat touched the pie though, didn’t he?”

Jamie shook his head. “But you’d still have to prove he intended to eat the bird. I mean, maybe I just wanted to touch the pie because it smelled so good.”

I seem to remember a rather sly grin appearing on Alan’s lips at that point. “You may think you know cats, Jamie, but I know you… I’ll bet you’d break off a little piece of the crust and eat it if nobody was looking.”

Jamie crossed his arms defiantly across his chest. “But I’m not a cat, so speak for yourself, eh?”

The summary trial ended in a snowball fight at that point; there was no verdict, and no resolution, but I do remember that both the prosecution and the defense seemed to be having a good time.

Snow falls on both sides of a dispute I think…

[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/if-animals-are-persons-should-they-bear-criminal-responsibility

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

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gozzter

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