Session: 3c
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 1.09
Chair: Chloë Taylor
Roundtable description: In 1386 France, a sow stood trial for killing a child. Found guilty of murder, she was sentenced to die in the public square. Although this scene may appear absurd today, European animal trials were common throughout the Middle Ages, highlighting how radically attitudes about animal moral capacities have shifted. Whereas medieval courts assumed animals could act with intent, malice, even premeditation, contemporary legal systems deny animals legal personhood, casting their acts as instinct rather than deliberation.
Animals are routinely victims of murder at human hands, and most animals are certainly capable of taking the lives of others. Outside the legal realm, however, it is not at all clear that animals cannot kill with malice intent or even premeditation. This roundtable thus asks, can animals commit murder? And what does this possibility reveal about how humans imagine responsibility, justice, and violence across species lines? The anthropologists and animal studies scholars on this panel will examine cases ranging from the scapegoating of “killer dogs” and “killer bulls” in right-wing India, reptiles taking human lives in captive environments, and big cats lashing out against their tormentors.
We will place our ethnographic research in dialogue with cultural, philosophical, and media representations of animal perpetrated homicide. From Moby-Dick, with its vengeful whale antagonist, to Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, which frames a fatal bear attack as potentially purposeful, cultural texts have long wrestled with animal intent. The Ghost and the Darkness dramatize lions as deliberate killers, while Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Patricia Highsmith’s unsettling animal stories raise the specter of animal revenge as justice.
By drawing these diverse cases into conversation, our roundtable seeks to spark debate by asking whether animals can commit murder. We aim to rethink crime, resistance, and injustice beyond the human.
Bios:
Naisargi N. Davé is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Davé is the author of two award-winning books, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (2023) and Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (2012), both from Duke University Press. She is currently working on a third book, Murder: The Social Life of Violent Death in 21st Century India.
Elan Abrell is an assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies at Wesleyan University. He is also the coordinator of Wesleyan’s Animal Studies minor. He is the author of Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care (2021, University of Minnesota Press), which was awarded the 2022 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology.
Deborah Hardt is an Assistant Professor in the Media Department at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. She is the author of “Dangerous Play: Orcas, Mêtis, and the Global Lockdown” (Humanimalia, 2024) and the book chapter “Animal Agency and Animal Subjectivities in Roar” in Animality and Horror Cinema: Creaturely Fear on Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). She is currently completing her monograph, Animal Revolt, forthcoming with Sydney University Press.