Animal Trials

There're more than 200 such trials officially attested to in the historical record, and lord knows how many others that didn't make the papers. This was something that happened so commonly that those involved didn't go through a lot of pains justifying themselves. It's been suggested that the reason these trials were so slavishly devoted to proper procedure was precisely because they were really built for the lawyers who tried them. Perhaps there were just too many lawyers to go around and not enough case work, so animals were brought to court just to keep everybody busy.