How might a court prove someone intended to eat something?
How might a court prove someone intended to eat something?
Context: This is a world inhabited by intelligent, non-anthro animals, some of which have decided to outlaw hunting and eating prey in favour of living in harmony and cooperating.
They have a zero tolerance policy for predation and it is criminalized extremely heavily. Depending on what species or taxon you are (all animals have the right to be tried by members of their own species and taxa, and they are responsible for carrying out sentences of their own kind too), First Degree Predation, where you personally kill then eat an animal, is the only crime that formally carries the death penalty. Regular first degree murder where you "merely" kill an animal without intent to eat them only has a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole. Second Degree Predation (aka Simple Predation) is where you obtain meat with the intention of eating it without personally killing anything, carries only a mandatory fixed term prison sentence in addition to losing certain freedoms post release.
However, their laws on the issue is very much based on intent as that is their philosophy, that because they are all sapient and no longer bound by their natural hunter instincts, they are responsible for their own actions. You don't have to actually eat the prey you killed to have committed First Degree Predation, and the inverse is technically true as well, where if you kill an animal for some other reason and only after they're dead do you decide to eat them, then you're technically only guilty of murder and Second Degree Predation instead of First Degree Predation. There are also legal ways that certain animals can obtain animal tissue, for example, as skin grafts and organ transplants, autopsy and forensic investigations, or for general research. Because animals handling tissue in these cases don't intend to eat it, it does not fall under Second Degree Predation. However, if you buy animal meat and later decide not to eat it, that's still considered predation.
Especially with the nature of eating and digesting food, law enforcement only has a very small time window to order a suspect to undergo lab testing of what's in their belly where it will actually show a positive hit for animal tissue, so my original thought is that the intent clause is meant to make prosecuting predation easier, since they wouldn't need to actually prove that the accused has animal tissue in their digestive tract at any point, just that they wanted at some point for some form of animal tissue to end up inside them.
I know there are many real life laws that use intent in a similar way, but I don't know how courts actually prove intent beyond a reasonable doubt. Can anyone who's delved more into the legal side of worldbuilding comment on how the courts in my world might prove (or disprove) that someone intended to eat another animal when they do not have direct evidence that the animal was indeed eaten?
You're viewing a single thread.
This is a fun question, and I'd have some interest in thoughts about things like felines, who are obligate carnivores and can't actually eat a meat free diet.
In any case, I'd think about factors like:
- method of death. Were they killed in a fashion that's not good for eating, like poison?
- Were "prime" cuts damaged by the kill?
- was the body treated in a fashion more akin to food, or to a body? Did they roll it up in a carpet, or wash it or put it in a fridge?
- did they have items on hand that they would need for cooking and preparing meat? Boning knives, fillet knives and the like?
- how much time did they have with the body? Premeditated butchering would involve setting aside a good chunk of time to drain blood, remove skin and organs, and properly cut the carcass. If they only had a short period of time, or had to evade detection, you could argue that they didn't intend to eat them, because they didn't have time to do it right.
Those are the ideas that come to mind for me.
You might read the summary of some court cases to get a feel for how lawyers argue things like intent, and then think about what a member of the species you're thinking about would need or want to do to eat meat. You can also mix in how humans cook food, since you can freely mix human culinary technique with animalistic traits and such.Thank you! All those factors make sense and gave me a lot to think about. I imagine it would also be extremely case-specific in terms of what kind of evidence suggests predation and your suggestions are a nice starting point!
Ricecake does have a great point.
A lot of predators are obligate. They don't have a choice about whether or not to eat meat. And there's plenty that are falcutative carnivores, meaning that they can eat other things and get nutrition, but only do so inefficiently and may suffer health issues because of that (the line between facultative carnivore and omnivore is blurry, since it depends mainly on how much amylase they produce; less of it, and the less they can digest plant matter)
So, you've got every cat, every ferret (and their close relatives), canids, pretty much all of the classic predators that are going to either die if they don't eat meat, or may be in bad health while pooping out undigested plant matter.
Out of the big predators, there's still things like bears that are omnivores, and can live off of nothing but plants, but have physiology that makes it very difficult. They're big enough that building up for hibernation off of only plants is a challenge sometimes.
So, you'll have to worry about all of that before you even get to the laws of your world and how they're prosecuted. How did the herbivores and omnivores get enough power to enforce these laws on other animals that will outright die without meat? Was there some kind of technological advancement to make the carnivores able to digest plants? Have they just killed off all the obligate carnivores?
If they are using technology, how did they get there? There aren't a lot of species with the bodies to allow them to manipulate (the word itself kind of defines what I'm talking about) their environment in a way friendly to complex chemistry. A cow simply can't run a chem lab unless something else made a shit ton of accessibility devices first.
Excepting elephants as the obvious possibility, the critters on land with that degree of fine manipulation are primates. Many of those are carnivores of some variety. So, how did all the technology get started to get them to the point where this new thing of allowing everyone to digest a veggie only diet? Why did all these intelligent carnivores agree to this?
And, how are they expected to overcome their instincts? Since all these critters developed the kind of intelligence to be able to have a multi-toxonomic discussion over ethics, how and why did the carnivores master their instincts to hunt and kill, when we haven't managed to do that in tens of thousands of years as a single species? Cats, dogs, chickens, they've all been "domesticated" for a long time, but none of them have been divested of their hunting instincts at all. Even dogs have only had it shifted into using that prey drive in other ways.
We're talking about changes to their anatomy, the way their bodies function, and the issue that all of them developed sapience. The kind of minds that can consider law at all is a pretty damn specialized thing. Literally no other species than humans have developed that kind of mind, and it radically changed our bodies.
So, you've got all these animals banning the eating of each other. A story about those laws is interesting for sure, but it begs for more background before it makes sense. I mean, unless you're just going to animal farm it with a hand wave. But, I expect you wouldn't be looking for world building communities to ask if you wanted to hand wave things.
I actually do have a lot of lore on how the predation problem is handled for carnivores! I'm going to copy paste the progression of how predators managed to rid themselves of the need for meat because I think it provides some good context in case you're interested:
During the history of my animals when they had a medieval level of technological development, relationships between predators and prey were such that if your species were in a formal alliance, they can't eat you. If you weren't, it was fair game. The threat of eating a prey species was often used as leverage by predators, basically comply with our demands or we'll start hunting you again.
This hypocracy was pointed out by scholars and philosophers on both the predator and prey sides, but for a long time not much changed because of the mostly monarchist empires that dotted the world that left no room for questioning the king's decisions. And even if there were, technology that can allow predator animals to subsist entirely on plant-based food simply did not exist yet. Some predator animals tried to get around the moral issues by eating only prey that have died of an unrelated cause, and this was quite controversial among prey species, with some figuring that it was better than living members of their species getting eaten, but others objected to the idea of the tomb of their beloved relatives being the belly of a predator (not the best material to make a casket with if you want to memorialize and preserve the departed). Nevertheless, access to freshly dead prey was mixed at best, and even if you swallowed the prey moments after they drew their last breath, the risk of food-borne infection was still much higher than live prey because most un-eaten prey animals died of disease, and this was a pre-antibiotic era.
This is also when many species and taxonomic groups became one government, as it was advantageous to have a united, consistent front when negotiating or generally interacting with other species. Say you're a mouse. You see a cat, you know what to expect because who they can and can't hunt is strictly enforced by their empire, so if the empire promises they won't eat you then you can be reasonably sure every cat won't eat you. This makes you more likely to engage in trade with cats and generally benefit both parties. This idea of species and taxonomic governments survive to their modern age, but now serve the purpose of better representing common interests, needs, and opinions of similar animals, though even this is challenged and many believe that it's better in the long term to change to a single government for all Unitist animals, and abandon drawn borders and territories as well. Debates about this in modern times is as spicy as back then when they were discussing the idea of "If you ally with us we won't eat you," with most believing that while a full dissolution of territories and separate taxonomic governments is inevitable as animals commingle more and more, but their society of predator and prey is simply not mature enough for this to happen tomorrow.
Meanwhile, technology for processing plant matter to be more compatible with carnivores, as well as attempts to synthesize nutrients only found in meat were happening at a breakneck pace. Starting with various methods of cooking and fermentation, but slowly progressing to proper bio- and organic chemistry as the field became ever more advanced. At a certain inflection point, when technology for this had advanced far enough to completely replace animal meat for some predator species (omnivores first, the tech to convert an obligate carnivore to plant based food came much later), a new ideology began to crop up: Unitism, based on the word unity, specifically the motto "Unity Among Animals." The idea was that if your species was able to subsist entirely on plants, the eating your fellow animals was obsolete. That if, instead of worrying oneself with hunting or avoiding being hunted, if we all just came together and pooled our resources and knowledge, everyone taking care of everyone else and operating as a collective where things were jointly owned and animals' needs were provided for, we can all but eliminate suffering and make life better for every animal: big or small, predator or prey, furred, scaled, or feathered. The flagship treaty developed under this new ideology is called the Interspecies Peace Agreement, which, among many other protections and rights granted, forbids any animal, species, taxon, or other entity signatory to it from eating prey, with no distinction between if you have an alliance with them or not, and the treaty explicitly states that you cannot rescind it once signed. This is the founding document for two of the three major world powers in the modern day.
Up until this point, the idea of a predator animal's own digestive tract being modified to be able to digest raw plant matter, break down cellulose and use it to synthesize all the required nutrients in vivo was merely conjecture. They understood the process by which food was digested and nutrients derived, but had little means to control it. But it wouldn't be long until the breakthrough came, in the form of the dietary enzyme supplement, a pill taken regularly that arms your digestive system with the ability to essentially be completely herbivorous. This breakthrough finally allowed obligate carnivores like cats to also break free from their predatory history for good.
The profile for my main character delves quite a bit into the "solving predation" aspect as well, particularly the history, as she was part of the reason obligate carnivores aren't so obligate anymore.
Dang! There's some brilliant ideas in there! I can see a lot of possible stories in that world, just from this one section of history. Groups rebelling, serial predators, the legal aspect you were asking about, etc. I'll come back to that in a sec, I promise.
But it makes me curious about how "they" handled the divide between social/group species and those that are either loners or only live in small family groups. When you have the time, anyway :)
But, on the legal side of things, my series that I'm writing is around forensics in a magical world, so I've done a little bit of looking into mens rea. What you're asking is essentially that, how to prove the accused was committing the crime intentionally.
With animals, you aren't able to use something as concrete as having purchases and practices with a new weapon, or looking up how to kill in a given way (or likely wouldn't very often). If they're hunting, they have weapons already. There's also the difficulty with crafting weapons that will work for more than one type of animal, but that's tangential.
I think where your critters are going to find mens rea is in the animal part of the accused. Most predators exhibit predictable behaviors before hunting. Most don't hunt for anything but food, so if they exhibited hunting behaviors, that's good indication that they had intent to hunt, rather than it being a killing for other reasons.
But! There are species that will engage in hunting behaviors without intending to kill, and might not eat the prey even if they do kill. That's not unusual for cats that are otherwise well fed. You'll see it in other domesticated predators as well (though not as often as cats). But it happens with captive animals sometimes.
So the animal courts in your world have it a lot harder proving intent to eat. Well, unless a faction of hardliners pushed through a law making the evidence of eating evidence of intent to eat. That's really the only way I can think of to make it any less difficult than it is for humans in our world. Proving intent is usually about stringing together "circumstantial" evidence (which isn't the weak thing people often think it is. Motive, intent, and opportunity are often built on nothing but circumstantial evidence).
So I think you'd run into a lot of variations of case law where mens rea is proven in different ways for the various genera, and possibly even on a species specific level. You'd have canids that would have intent hard to prove because they have very little prior intent behaviors. They tend to take hunts more loosely at the beginning unless, and use persistence tactics (depends on the species a lot, though) prey drive is triggered suddenly. Cats, though, run high to stalking behaviors, so evidence of them stalking is going to be fairly convincing that they were hunting for food rather than having killed someone over a disagreement.
Something like a bear doesn't usually kill at all unless it's going to eat, or it's being threatened, so the fact of eating is an even stronger indicator of intent, and if there's exacerbating evidence as well, conniving a jury gets easier.
As a loose example, say that a cat was found to have killed a mouse. If there's video footage of it crouched down, with its tail twitching and legs moving to keep them prepped for a pounce, that's almost incontrovertible proof they were killing prey. But if the mouse had run out in front of them and they just swiped with claws and then bit, it would point towards an impulse kill, instinct overwhelming the conscious mind.
If the pouncing cat had also been seen following a scent, well, kitty is in trouble because even other cats would recognize that. But, maybe if the cat had been hunting after a blow to the head, the jury might decide that it couldn't form legal intent, and thus only be liable for the killing itself, not the eating.
There's a metric buttload of case law on mens rea, and reams of writing used in law schools on how to prove it. Waaay more than I've ever waded through tbh. But I think that's where your direct research would need to go. Most counties have law libraries that the public can access (I think, I know mine does, and it's a fairly poor county). Not sure what access would be like outside the US, but there's usually online access to at least the actual legislation around such things, and a lot of sites exist for legal info.
Dunno if that helps or not.
A lot of interesting info for me to think about, thank you!