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?
I’m seeing some analogies between second degree predation and drug possession charges. In the latter, it is written as the willful possession of illegal substances, meaning the prosecution must demonstrate mens rea, or the guilty mind. If someone is not aware that they are in possession of an illegal substance, or are not aware that the substance is illegal, they have a valid defense against the crime. What happens in your world if someone plants meat in someone’s home? Would they need to prove they were not guilty of predation, or can they maintain a presumption of innocence despite being “caught red handed” in possession?
Ultimately, for any felony crime, text messages, photos, letters, history of past usage, discarded or used paraphernalia, etc., all can be used in establishing mens rea in the case. Even song lyrics or poetry written by a defendant have been entered into evidence, see the recent murder case against YNW Melly.
Thus, the prosecution must prove to the jury that the defendant willfully intended to commit the crime, which depending on prevailing public opinion, may be an easier or harder bar to clear depending on jury composition. For instance, as has been described in that article, the current trend is against accepting “artistic expression” as evidence, however, 30-50 years ago, such evidence would have been used with no qualms whatsoever.
I have no real advice on how they might or might not prove that, only that "you can't prove a negative." So it seems like the onus would be on proving that you were trying to do something, rather than proving that you were not.
But more importantly, I want to read this book. Haha. I desperately need to know how non anthro animals perform skin grafts, and what a jury made entirely of wolves is like. Is the judge a wolf? Such an interesting way of doing things, and I would love to learn more.
Thank you! I personally do struggle with coming up with prose that convey the fact that they are four legged non-anthro animals and not just regular ol' furries a lot (not saying anthros/furries are a bad thing obviously, it's just that most animal characters nowadays seem to be anthro so people tend to assume that as the default), without the entire thing coming off as tacky and hard to read, or worse telling instead of showing. Honestly now that I think about it, that's probably why I've been focused on writing the lore and big picture plot outlines instead of actually sitting down and writing the plot. Getting there though, I felt like my recent post about my main character was fairly story-like rather than like the abstract of a paper.
A lot of my animal writing "skills" probably came from Warrior Cats and I should read Watership Down and Farthing Wood at some point too (I watched the cartoons but never read the books).
I think it's a really interesting concept, and could be a very fun read. I love the idea of reading little details that show how they get along, how their world is designed differently to ours to accommodate their body styles. As someone who does disability activism, there's a concept that sometimes blows able bodied people's minds, that physical disabilities are only as limiting as they are because the world is inherently designed for a different body style or ability. If the world were designed with wheelchair users in mind as the primary, we may not even consider a wheelchair user to be disabled. I love the idea of a society designed for a 4 legged body plan.
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.
This is actually a pretty large chunk of the world building of the manga/anime Beastars. The first bit mystery/plot is who killed and ate someone at the MCs school.
Ends up being a reoccurring plot device, being a predator (MC is a timber wolf iirc) living amoungest prey (rabbits, deer, etc...) and how one deals with the drive to kill.