Historical animal trials reveal how deeply humans project moral responsibility onto nature

Roach opens by describing a real strain of legal history in which European courts, centuries ago, formally prosecuted animals, and sometimes even insects, for offenses like crop destruction or livestock deaths, complete with assigned legal defense and issued verdicts. These proceedings weren't jokes to the people involved; they reflected a genuine belief that moral accountability extended to the natural world, not just to humans.

She treats these trials less as quaint historical curiosities and more as an early, exaggerated version of an impulse that persists today, our habit of describing animal behavior in moral and legal terms, calling a bear that raids trash a repeat offender or a leopard that kills livestock a culprit, language that smuggles in human concepts of guilt and intention that don't actually apply to instinctual behavior.

The throughline she draws is that modern wildlife management bureaucracy, however scientific its methods, still carries an inherited framework that treats animal behavior as something requiring judgment rather than simply understanding.

Takeaway: we've replaced courtroom verdicts for animals with bureaucratic ones, but the underlying impulse to moralize instinct hasn't fully disappeared.