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Animals Formally Arrested / Prosecuted / Executed For Crimes

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Mighty_Emperor

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There are numerous cases of animals being put in th dock (I think one of the Books of Lists has a list of a number of cases) but surly tht wouldn't happen in this modern day and age?

Jury Clears Cow in Car Accident

Mon Jan 26, 8:17 PM ET


CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - A Linn County jury has cleared a cow and the cow's owner in a car wreck, saying it was a case of mistaken identity.


Ann Sauer of Anamosa hit a cow on Oct. 7, 2000. The animal caved in the windshield and roof of her car.

The cow fled the scene, but Sauer said she knew which one did the damage.

"We briefly looked at each other before she went off in the darkness," Sauer said.

Sauer filed a negligence lawsuit against Justin Kaczinski, the alleged owner of the cow. Her lawsuit also named Alvin Benesh, who allowed Kaczinski to keep four cows and a bull in one of his pastures.

During the trial, which lasted six days, Kaczinski acknowledged that his cows had broken out of a pasture on the night of the accident.

The jury forewoman, Sheila Schmidt, said when Kaczinski's cow was found, its injuries did not match the injuries a cow would have suffered if it were hit in the way Sauer described.

"It's possible it could have been Kaczinski's cow, but it just wasn't proved," Schmidt said.

The jury deliberated for about three hours before returning a verdict last Wednesday in favor of Kaczinski and Benesh.
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...6&e=10&u=/ap/20040127/ap_on_fe_st/cow_cleared

I'm sorry but the cow was seen leaving the scene of a raod accident and that is illegal!!!

Emps
 
Not sure where to put this, general may have to do.
Yesterday I got an email with a correspondent friend of mine with this image attached:
mary.jpg

I asked her what it was, and she sent me some details.
This is where Murderous Mary, a five-ton cow elephant with the Sparks Brothers Circus, was hung by the neck from Derrick Car 1400 on September 13, 1916. The story of why and how Mary died is, of course, obscured by time and countless retelling: an example of the best and worst of oral history. It is tragic, absurd, excessive: quintessential turn-of-the-century America.
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There is a fair bit of stuff out there on this, most of it seems rehashed and probably embellished, but I thought it was an extraordinary (and cruel and stupid) thing. Link here, another here. Note second link has a few other similar tales.
Is this story common knowledge in the FT world?

Both embedded links are dead. The original links led to these web articles:

From The Archive: The Day They Hanged an Elephant in East Tennessee
https://blueridgecountry.com/archive/favorites/mary-the-elephant/

The Hanging of Mary the Elephant
http://sites.rootsweb.com/~tnunicoi/mary.htm
 
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I think there have been a number of wild animal executions, used to be more common, or so the article on them in Strange Stories, Amazing Facts made it seem.

There was footage of an elephant being electrocuted on the Dr. Death film by Errol Morris.
 
That photograph is IIRC in the First Book of Lists , published in the 70s , which I have but can't find to hand at the moment . That's the only place I've seen it.

A very strange and unsettling image.

-
 
The curio page at voltini.com has more info on Betsy the elephant, who was executed by electrocution at Coney Island in 1903, including movie footage of the event(!)

The previous link is fairly harmless (unless you click for the movie) aside from b&w stills of poor Betsy, but i'll run it with the caveat that some of the other pages on voltini's site are pretty nasty, afaik for pictures of what happens to people who do stupid things with electricity :shock:

Edit: The link is dead. An archived version of the MIA webpage can be accessed at the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060716234323/http://www.voltini.com/id25.htm

Here's the relevant text from the MIA webpage:

Meet 'Topsy', the circus elephant executed for killing three men.
She was killed by electrocution at Luna Park, Coney Island on January 5th 1903.

The owners of Luna Park, Thompson and Dundy, had previously tried to kill Topsy with cyanide-laced carrots which she wolfed down without effect. They then planned to hang her, but protests by the ASPCA deemed it a 'cruel and unusual' punishment and they backed down. New York State had recently replaced the gallows with the modern electric chair, so electrocution was decided upon as the more humane method of execution.

Enter Thomas Edison. At this time he was engaged in his own free-for-all, battling George Westinghouse for control of America's electric infrastructure. Edison had declared that his direct current system was safe, but that Westinghouse's alternating current was a deadly menace. To prove it, Edison had been publicly electrocuting cats and dogs (aswell as the occasional calf, horse and orangutan) for years. It was Edison who convinced New York to use Westinghouse's 'deadly' AC for the electric chair, and it was Westinghouse's AC that Edison used to publicly execute Topsy.

A huge crowd gathered to witness the event. Using six thousand volts of electricity, she died twenty two seconds from the moment the electricity was turned on.
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Here's the photo of the executed Topsy ...

08e91fd0.jpg

​
The associated MPEG video cannot be played on the Wayback Machine's archived page, but it can be downloaded if you click on the link and select your device's download option at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060720194019/http://www.voltini.com/HTMLobj-371/edisonelephant.mpeg
 
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There's been several similar instances of elephant executions.

The performer Curtis Eller does a song called Black Diamond, about a circus elephant in the US that killed a handler, and was executed by firing squad. The story appears online at Meet The Unwilling Performers, along with several other animal execution tales:

On October 12, 1929, a majestic bull elephant named Black Diamond was among a procession of animals being marched from a rail yard to the circus grounds in Corsicana, Texas. A crowd had gathered to watch the parade. Along the way, the elephants stopped and lined up near a fire hydrant waiting their turn for a drink of water. A local woman wanting to pet the enormous Black Diamond approached him. In a matter of moments, the elephant knocked her to the ground and gored her to death, then whirled around, destroyed a parked car, and injured two trainers.

Days later, owner John Ringling ordered Black Diamond's execution. The killing method became a topic of debate. Some suggested that Black Diamond's feet be bound with tons of lead and that he be dragged by tugboat into the Gulf of Mexico and left to drown. Others thought that chains should be wrapped around his neck with the other ends shackled to his fellow elephants who would be forced to slowly strangle him to death. Still others recommended electrocution. Black Diamond's executioners ultimately decided on poison. If that failed, they would shoot him to death.

When the circus arrived in Kennedy, Texas, Black Diamond was led away to a forest clearing and chained between two trees. He refused to eat the poison-laced peanut shells and oranges. A volunteer firing squad of 20 men took aim and pumped some 170 bullets into Black Diamond. Black Diamond's bullet-ridden head was chopped off and mounted for display in Houston, Texas.
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NOTE: The originally posted link is dead. An archived version can be accessed at the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20041010172327/http://www.circuses.com/unwilling.asp
 
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I believe there was a similar incident at the London Menagerie, where an elephant went 'mad' and after an attempt at poisoning it failed, a firing squad was brought in, only succeeding after shooting it something like 250 times:( though the only reference i can find to this on the net is at London Elephants, which is either telling the story differently, or perhaps is a similar but not the same case:

Exeter Change was built as small shops in 1676 on the site of Exeter House. In 1773 Edward Cross opened a menagerie which included lions, tigers, monkeys and an elephant named Chunee/Chuny imported from Bengal. In a fit of bad temper this 5 ton animal tried to break out of its cage in 1826. Attempts to shoot it were made by a civilian and then soldiers from Somerset House. A cannon was sent for but before it arrived a keeper finished the job with a harpoon. Three days later visitors paid to see nine butchers spend 12 hours skinning the beast which was then dissected by 10 surgeons watched by their students. The meat was taken away and Cross displayed the skeleton with the bullet holes in the skull still visable. The public's response ranged from recipes for elephant stew to poems and a play at Sadler's Wells
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The picture is from the 'more info' link on this page:

Edit: The photo link is dead, and the image is not included in the Wayback Machine archive. No other archived version found, and it's unclear what image it was that's MIA. Here is a contemporary print illustration of Chunee's / Chuny's execution.

ChuneeOrChuny-Execution.jpg
 
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I found it - it was Topsy the Electrocuted Elephant!
Topsy the Electrocuted Elephant
On Sunday January 4, 1903, crowds at Coney Island's electrically lit show-piece Luna Park watched the public execution of Topsy, a female elephant employed by the Park to give rides and carry construction materials.

The Commercial Advertiser, New York, Monday, January 5, 1903.

BAD ELEPHANT KILLED.

Topsy Meets Quick and Painless
Death at Coney Island.

Topsy, the ill-tempered Coney Island elephant, was put to death in Luna Park, Coney Island, yesterday afternoon. The execution was witnessed by 1,500 or more curious persons, who went down to the island to see the end of the huge beast, to whom they had fed peanuts and cakes in summers that are gone. In order to make Topsy's execution quick and sure 460 grams of cyanide of potassium were fed to her in carrots. Then a hawser was put around her neck and one end attached to a donkey engine and the other to a post. Next wooden sandals lined with copper were attached to her feet. These electrodes were connected by copper wire with the Edison electric light plant and a current of 6,600 volts was sent through her body. The big beast died without a trumpet or a groan.

Topsy was brought to this country twenty-eight years ago by the Forepaugh Circus, and has been exhibited throughout the United States. She was ten feet high and 19 feet 11 inches in length. Topsy developed a bad temper two years ago and killed two keepers in Texas. Last spring, when the Forepaugh show was in Brooklyn, J. F. Blount, a keeper, tried to feed a lighted cigarette to her. She picked him up with her trunk and dashed him to the ground, killing him instantly.
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Meet 'Topsy', the circus elephant executed for killing three men.
She was killed by electrocution at Luna Park, Coney Island on January 5th 1903.
Click to expand...

On Sunday January 4, 1903, crowds at Coney Island's electrically lit show-piece Luna Park watched the public execution of Topsy, a female elephant employed by the Park to give rides and carry construction materials.
Click to expand...

Unless they did two on consecutive days, i guess the reporting's got slightly off. :?

I haven't watched the video footage as i find that sort of thing too much, but according to voltini, the execution takes around 20 seconds, certainly not instantaneous. The stills seem to be showing a frightening amount of sparks/arcing going on too...
 
Yes - this is one of the most upsetting threads I have seen on here. Poor elephants :cry:
 
Definately DON'T see the Dr. Death documentary - it has the whole thing shown as a segemnt, and it's danged disturbing. I certainly wish I had never seen it!
 
As I said initially:
an extraordinary (and cruel and stupid) thing.
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and that original image I posted is, as Rrose said, strange and unsettling.

However, all due apologies to anyone upset by this.
 
I'm from northeast Tennessee - the scene of the Mary incident. She killed a recently-arrived handler in Kingsport TN during a circus parade.

The circus operators and local legal professionals were in a quandary as to what to do. Mary's history of earlier violence had been covered up. This, plus the threat of liability issues made the circus operators very compliant - to the point they pretty much pushed to turn it into a spectacle. Everyone had some vested interest in saving face, and the whole 'circus' (pun probably intended....) trundled to its sad conclusion through a sort of consensual blundering ...

There was a perfunctory trial and a formal sentencing. Mary was transported to Erwin TN (site of a railroad service / salvage yard) because the rail company's derrick was the only apparatus judged capable of handling the prescribed method of execution. I don't specifically recall if there'd been an earlier failed attempt at a hanging.

As I've always understood it, the picture originally posted is a retouched print used in newspaper articles. The original is lost. So far as I know, that's the only surviving 'live' image of the hanging, though I'd swear I've seen a photo from another angle in a newspaper article on the story back in the 1950's or early 1960's.

The Mary story's been mentioned many times over the decades. Someone from the area assembled a small book on the subject, entitled something like _The Day They Hanged the Elephant_. So far as I know, that's the only publication dedicated to the Mary story.
 
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Just awful. Exactly why I encourage everyone to boycott circuses that use animals. I remember a story in the 90's about an elephant named Tyke who burst free of his pen, went on a rampage, and was shot dead in the streets of Honolulu. It is so very wrong to make these creatures perform against their will. Personally, I'd much rather see an elephant just being an elephant in its natural environment. I don't want to see him ride a bike or stand on his hind legs (a very unnatural position for an elephant) or even carry a human child on its back.
 
bazizmaduno said:
Sometimes the human race disgusts me :x
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Sometimes it disgusts me, too, but I'm not certain as to this particular case.

Hanging may have been the most humane method of dispatching this truly dangerous animal.

Or would shooting the beast 250 times have been more humane?

There probably was no elephant gun handy, and even that would likely have required multiple shots.
 
MrRING said:
I. Last spring, when the Forepaugh show was in Brooklyn, J. F. Blount, a keeper, tried to feed a lighted cigarette to her. She picked him up with her trunk and dashed him to the ground, killing him instantly.
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Well, anyone who would try to feed a lit cigarette to an elephant deserves whatever he gets! :evil:
 
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Remember the zoo keeper from South Korea (I think it was) who around two years ago came up with the brilliant idea of defecating on the tigers?

He's not with us any longer. In fact, he wasn't with us 10 minutes later.
 
It's such a horrible picture- I first saw it in Bizarre a couple of years ago.
If a man is hanged, he at least knows that it's going to happen and why. Imagine the panic such a creature would have felt being slowly hoisted by the neck- nothing on this scale could have been done quickly.
And the people who would have flocked to witness it... Why?
Augh, people are such stupid and supremely arrogant creatures.
"We have forced this creature to live in an unnatural environment and perform unnatural acts. It doesn't like it and has turned on us. Let's kill it in public and put on a big show for the punters!" :evil: :evil: :evil:
 
Agreed, if the elephant had not been in captivity in the first place this tragedy would never have taken place.

But on a pragmatic level, once an elephant already in captivity turns murderous, how DO you dispose of it?

Shooting 250 bullets into the animal (as was done to an elephant a few decades earlier in England) strikes me as a far more inhumane method than hanging.

With the elephant who was electrocuted in 1903, this was not resorted to until after CYANIDE had failed to work.
 
kirmildew said:
It's such a horrible picture-
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So are photographs of hanged humans.

If a man is hanged, he at least knows that it's going to happen and why.
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You are selling elephant intelligence WAY short. I strongly suspect that the elephant knew exactly what was happening....and why.

Intelligent dogs have an understanding vocabulary of approximately 200 words (often in more than one language). God only knows the vocabulary of an elephant who's spent years among humans!

P. S. When I was around 10 years old I approached a caged female elephant in the Cincinnati Zoo. (Those cages are now just a memory of the distant past.)

"Hello, Mrs. Elephant," I said. "Please blow on me!"

The lady kindly extended her trunk out from between the bars to within about three inches of my face and gave me a blast that nearly knocked me flat on the Elephant House floor.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
kirmildew said:
It's such a horrible picture-
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So are photographs of hanged humans.

If a man is hanged, he at least knows that it's going to happen and why.
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You are selling elephant intelligence WAY short. I strongly suspect that the elephant knew exactly what was happening....and why.

.
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I don't enjoy looking at pictures of hanged humans either!
It's the very unnaturalness of the picture that's unsettling. Like the hanged Dalmatian that was in the papers last year- not something you expect to see and not pleasant.

The point I was trying to make, if not very well, was that the elephant wouldn't likely know that it was being put to death to atone for killing people, like a man would. He would also know in advance when his hour was nigh, though how an elephant would mentally prepare for its own execution I don't know.
I don't doubt the intelligence of elephants, I just doubt that it would see its own angry retaliation at the humans around it as leading to its own death. Maybe if it did it wouldn't lose its temper in the first place? Unless it wanted putting out of the misery of its confinement...
 
kirmildew said:
The point I was trying to make, if not very well, was that the elephant wouldn't likely know that it was being put to death to atone for killing people, like a man would. He would also know in advance when his hour was nigh, though how an elephant would mentally prepare for its own execution I don't know..
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Besides its own listening vocabulary, the elephant may very well have learned of its fate from other elephants. Elephants DO have a language, but it is of such a low frequency that humans can't even hear it.

But "atone" has nothing whatsoever to do with it. The pragmatic question was - how do we neutralize this multi-ton killer?
 
OldTimeRadio said:
kirmildew said:
The point I was trying to make, if not very well, was that the elephant wouldn't likely know that it was being put to death to atone for killing people, like a man would. He would also know in advance when his hour was nigh, though how an elephant would mentally prepare for its own execution I don't know..
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Besides its own listening vocabulary, the elephant may very well have learned of its fate from other elephants. Elephants DO have a language, but it is of such a low frequency that humans can't even hear it.

But "atone" has nothing whatsoever to do with it. The pragmatic question was - how to we neutralize this multi-ton killer?
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But was Mary kept with other elephants and how would they know what was going to happen?
Anyhoo. I would bet there was a certain level of being made to atone for causing people's deaths in the minds of the people carrying out her 'sentence'. But personally I have no idea how I would dispose of an elephant. Surely some sort of large- calibre shot to the brain or the back of the neck would be more humane than strangulation?
How do vets dispose of them in zoos where they need putting to sleep? I know horses get the boltgun between the eyes but there's quite a size difference!
 
kirmildew said:
How do vets dispose of them in zoos where they need putting to sleep? I know horses get the boltgun between the eyes but there's quite a size difference!
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Not sure about vets in Zoos but Millitary elephants where killed by a very big spike being driven into the base of the shull by the Mahout (animals keeper) at the first sign of the animal going wild just to make sure it does not do to much damage to its own side.

I vaguely remember a worlds wildest police videos type program several years ago which showed an enraged Elephant destroying a zoo. I believe that it was enventually killed by a sherifs deputy using a very heavy duty Shotgun.
 
kirmildew said:
But personally I have no idea how I would dispose of an elephant. Surely some sort of large- calibre shot to the brain or the back of the neck would be more humane than strangulation?
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Agreed. But if the execution was properly carried out, the cause of death would have been an immediate broken neck and NOT strangulation. Strangulatiuon is always the result of a botched execution.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
kirmildew said:
But personally I have no idea how I would dispose of an elephant. Surely some sort of large- calibre shot to the brain or the back of the neck would be more humane than strangulation?
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Agreed. But if the execution was properly carried out, the cause of death would have been an immediate broken neck and NOT strangulation. Strangulatiuon is always the result of a botched execution.
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If my knowledge of the process is correct the snapping of the vertebrae is mainly due to the drop and sudden deccelleration of the body, logisically how are you going to create a platform of a suitable size to support a confused and probably terrified elephant whilst enabling it to be dropped away at a rate that will ensure that the animal is killed instantly.
 
George_millett said:
If my knowledge of the process is correct the snapping of the vertebrae is mainly due to the drop and sudden deccelleration of the body, logisically how are you going to create a platform of a suitable size to support a confused and probably terrified elephant whilst enabling it to be dropped away at a rate that will ensure that the animal is killed instantly.
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What he said lol. My problem with this execution method is it appears to involve the elephant being hoisted up into the air, surely causing suffering and slow death, rather than the clean jerk needed for a broken neck.
 
I'm NOT in favor of killing elephants for ANY reason. Maybe the guys who so mistreated this female elephant as to turn it into a killer should have been the ones punished.
 
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