The judicial trial of animal defendants is a part of history I've been aware of so long, it never occurred to me until recently that most people - even history and histfic geeks - have not heard of it. The older I get, the more I run into things like that - tidbits and factoids, and even their debunkings, I know, and consider almost part of the wallpaper of given knowledge - which hardly anybody else has ever heard of.
Twenty years ago, Colin Firth starred in "The Advocate" (also called "The Day of the Pig"), a mystery set amidst the trial of a pig for murder. More recently, The History Girls have been getting attention with the linked post discussing this phenomenon.
I recommend both the post and the movie - not least for the latter's supporting turns by Ian Holm and Nicol Williamson (possibly best known as Merlin in "Excalibur"), who has the best line in the movie, in an assessment of his daughter's - ahh - marriageability.
Do you ever have "huh" moments about things you think of as common knowledge, which turn out to be unheard of by most others?
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3 comments:
My favorite is "Trial of the Cannibal Dog," about sailors in Polynesia, and how the effects of cultural contact were not uni-directional.
Okay, THAT sounds fascinating!
The captain was following the prime directive, not allowing the crew to go ashore and kill in revenge for what appeared to them to have been cannibalization of their mates. So when their adopted Polynesian dog bit one of the crew, they tried it for cannibalism.
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