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Who do you think said this: “I tried to distract him with lights and music because I heard bears are afraid of that”?

No marks if you said it was Eeyore or Tigger speaking of Winnie-the-Pooh, nor if you said it was Mr Brown about Paddington Bear.

It was Zoran Kiseloski appearing recently as the chief prosecution witness in the case against a brown bear accused of stealing honey.

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The court in Bitola, Macedonia, was told that the bear had been stealing honey from the hives of Mr Kiseloski, a bee keeper. Mr Kiseloski had made his own attempts at crime prevention based on bears' apparent fear of lights and music. He didn’t do this half-heartedly. He bought a generator and flooded the bee-hive area with light. He also hooked up a sound system and pumped music out at its highest volume. His choice of deterrent was “the songs of Ceca”, which are in the genre of “turbo-folk”. In the world of sonic repulsions, turbo-folk does sound as if it would be awful enough to keep back even a wild bear with a low sugar count. But it was not to be so.

Illuminated in halogen, and soundtracked to the thrashing beat of turbo-folk, the bear bounced back. According to the prosecution it then dishonestly misappropriated a great quantity of honey. The court found the bear guilty. The lawyer for Mr Kiseloski asked for a compensation order to be made. As the bear didn’t have an owner, the court instructed the state to pay the compensation set at £1,700.

Historically, animals weren’t put on trial in England but they were in other parts of Europe. Around 1510, for eating a barley crop in Autun, France, a pack of rats was prosecuted. Sadakat Kadri records in The Trial the ingenious arguments used by Bartholomew Chassenée, the rats’ lawyer, to try to get them acquitted. He got one adjournment because the trumpets used to summon the rats to court didn’t bring all of them there, and no one should be tried in their absence. The court agreed and asked for a better summoning to court to take place through sermons.

Then, when the court tried to start the trial later (with some rats absent), Chassenée asked for a further adjournment. He noted the ancient principle that no defendant was required to risk life or limb in getting to court, and that his rat clients couldn’t attend because their route to court was beset by the dangers of cats and dogs. He won another postponement. Eventually, though, the rats were banished but only after many had been able to flee the court’s jurisdiction because of their clever lawyer.

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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