There are some parallels between historical witch trials and trials of non-human animals in the same period, with a lot of the same procedures as were used when human beings were charged with a crime.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We've done several episodes of the show about witch trials. Those have not always been in October, but they are a lot of the time, and there are some parallels between historical witch trials and another type of trial that was carried out in some of the same parts of the world and in an overlapping time period, and that is trials of non human animals with a lot of the same procedures that were used when human beings were charged with a crime. The idea of putting non human animals on trial might make it sound like this episode will have wacky high jinks in it. I maybe to people. I told an acquaintance about this topic over the weekend and they were immediately horrified, So maybe some folks are not thinking wacky hijinks. There are some moments of what come off to me is kind of comical absurdity. But this episode does include a lot of harm to animals that typically follows harm to people, with those people usually being babies and children. So that's potentially a lot. Also, there are a couple of references to sex crimes involving animals in this episode. Almost all of this is in the later part of the episode, so if you would rather listen to just the first two thirds of it, we won't judge. H Also, let's just all take it as a given that we all understand that humans are also animals, but that trying to say non human animals every time we're not talking about humans in an audio podcast would become very clunkily repetitive, not as fun to listen to in an episode that already has some unfunds. So right. The idea of killing or otherwise punishing an animal that has harmed a human is, of course something that goes back to very early history. It is not the least bit unique to anyone part of the world. It's also obviously not something that is confined to the past. But what we're talking about today isn't simply something like hunting down a wild animal that is believed to be attacking people, or calling an exterminator to deal with some kind of infestation. And it was also a bit different from a person being put on trial or sued after their pet attacked someone. These were formal proceedings that were carried out against an animal or a group of animals. There are some descriptions of sort of symbolic or ceremonial trials that pre date what we're talking about. For example, in the classical period of Athens around five hundred BC, there was sort of a protocol for dealing with non human animals and even non living things that had caused a person's death. There's less documentation of how this was applied to animals, but here is how Plato described what would happen if something that was not alive killed a person, like if a stone fell onto somebody who was walking below quote if any lifeless thing deprive a man of life, except in the case of a thunderbolt or other fatal dart sent from the gods, whether a man is killed by lifeless objects falling upon him, or his falling upon them, the nearest of kin shall appoint the nearest neighbor to be a judge, and thereby acquit himself and the whole family of guilt. And he shall cast forth the guilty thing beyond the border. The trials that we're talking about today were often more involved than just designating a neighbor to act as a judge and throwing an errent stone out beyond the border. These fell into two broad categories, ecclesiastical trials and secular trials. Both involved judges and lawyers, and some kind of legal representation appointed for the animal defendant. An essay called Saint Anthony and the Pigs Legal Prosecutions of the Lower Animals was published in eighteen sixty four in Robert Chambers The Book of Days, a miscellny of popular antiquities and connection with the calendar, including anecdote, biography and history, curiosities and literature, and oddities of human life and character. This essay describes this division between ecclesiastical and secular trials this way quote on the continent down to a comparatively late period. The lower animals were, in all respects considered amenable to the laws. Domestic animals were tried in the the common criminal courts, and their punishment on conviction was death. Wild animals fell under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, and their punishment was banishment and death by exorcism and excommunication. Nor was the latter a light punishment. We all know how Saint Patrick exercised the Irish reptiles into the sea, and Saint Bernard one day, by peevishly saying be thou excommunicated to a blue bottle fly that annoyed him by buzzing about his ears, unwittingly destroyed the flies of a whole district. Some historians have interpreted the difference between ecclesiastical and secular trials as being more about the nature of the crime than whether the animal was domestic or wild. Church authorities often handled cases of damage to property or generally being a nuisance, which were more likely to involve rodents, insects, or birds, while secular authorities handled cases in which a person was seriously injured or killed, which was more likely to involve a large mammal. Edward Payson Evans, whose nineteen oh six book The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals has become a major source of information about these trials, and his explanation kind of blends these two ideas. Quote. Animals which were in the service of man could be arrested, tried, convicted, and executed like any other members of his household. It was therefore not necessary to summon them to appear in court at a specified time to answer for their conduct and thus make them, in the strict sense of the term, a party to the prosecution, for the sheriff had already taken them in charge and consigned them to the custody of the jailer. Insects and rodents, on the other hand, which were not subject to human control and could not be seized and imprisoned by civil authorities, demanded the intervention of the Church and the exercise of its supernatural functions for the purpose of compelling them to desist from their devastations and to retire from all places devoted to the production of human sustenance. The only feasible method of staying the ravages of these swarms of noxious creatures was to resort to metaphysical aid and to expel or exterminate them by sacerdotal conjuring and cursing, regardless of whether secular or ecclesiastical authorities were involved. Biblical passages were part of the reasoning behind these trials. One is Exodus, chapter twenty one, verse twenty eight quote. If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall be quit. Chambers Book of Days also noted other passages relating to Church authority over non ua human life. Quote as God cursed the serpent David, the mountains of Gilboa, and our Savior the barren fig tree. So in like manner, the Church had full power and authority to exercise, anathematize, and excommunicate all animate and inanimate things. But as the lower animals, being created before man, were the elderborn and first heirs of the earth, as God blessed them and gave them every green herb for meat, as they were provided for in the arc, and entitled to the privileges of the Sabbath, they must ever be treated with the greatest clemency consistent with justice. So the idea that animals could or should be subjected to these kinds of legal proceedings definitely was not universal. For example, Italian philosopher and priest Thomas Aquinas wrote about animals and animal rights in the thirteenth century. Aquinas argued that since animals are not rational beings, they could not be blessed or cursed unless that blessing or curse came from God, and he argued that animals were acting as God's agents in connection to humanity. Walter Woodburn Hyde, who was a twentieth century scholar of ancient Greece and Rome, summed up a Quinas's condemnation of these kinds of animal trials as quote. If then we regard such animals as the creatures of God, employed by him to carry out his purposes, it would be blasphemy to curse them. If we regard them merely as brutes, such cursing would be vain and unlawful. The essay in Chambers Book of Days commented on these disagreements as well quote. Some learned canonists, however, disputed those propositions, alleging that authority to try and punish offenses under the law implied a contract quasi contract packed or stipulation between the supreme power that made and administered the law and those subjected to it. They contended that the lower animals, being devoid of intelligence, no such pact ever had been or could be made, and that punishments for injuries committed unintentionally and in ignorance of the law were unjust. They questioned also the authority of the church to anathematize those whom she did not undertake to baptize, and adduced to the example of the archangel Michael, who, when contending with Satan for the body of Moses, did not make a railing accusation against the old serpent, but left it to the Lord to rebuke him. Such discussions appear like the amusing inventions of Rabelais or Swift, but they were no jesting matter to the simple agriculturists who engaged in those litigations. So while there were disagreements, both ecclesiastical and secular, trials were documented in eastern France and the neighboring parts of Germany, Switzerland and Italy, and then there were also more scattered reports of similar trials than other parts of the world, including at least one or two trials in a lot of the rest of Europe, Ethiopia, Turkia, and the Americas. These trials were reported from the ninth through the twentieth centuries. To be clear, only just a couple in the twentieth century, but they were by far the most frequent and the most widespread. From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. It would be impossible to talk about all of the animal trials that were reported during this period. That nineteen oh six book includes an appendix that lists one hundred and ninety one of them, And while some of those may be apocryphal, there were likely others that aren't included in the list, Plus some of them were truly gruesome. But we'll talk about some illustrative examples, starting with cases that did not involve loss of human life. After we pause for a sponsor break, we are going to start by talking about the trials of vermin, which did not typically involve the loss of human life and sometimes did not involve the deaths of any animals either. Chambers Book of Days describes them this way quote. The general course of a process was as follows. The inhabitants of the district being annoyed by certain animals. The court appointed experts to survey and report upon the damage committed. An advocate was then appointed to defend the animals and show cause why they should not be summoned. They were then cited three several times, and not appearing, judgment was given against them by default. The court next issued a monitor warning the animals to leave the district within a certain time. Under penalty of adjuration, and if they did not disappear on or before the period appointed, the exorcism was with all sole pronounced. I really love the idea of going, hey, you guys, we gave you a citation. I know you're a rat and you can't read, but I really feel strongly about this issue in this context that Tracy just talked about. In case it isn't clear, a monitor or monitor was basically a letter covering the charge, again presuming that these animals could read. Chambers goes on to say that this process wasn't necessarily efficient. Quote this looks straightforward enough, but the delays and uncertainties of the law, ecclesiastical law especially, have long been proverbial. The courts, by every available means of delay, evaded the last extremity of pronouncing the exorcism, probably lest the animals should neglect to pay attention to it. Indeed, it is actually recorded that in some instances the noxious animals, instead of withering off the face of the earth after being anathematized, became more abundant and destructive than before this. The doctors learned in the la law attributed neither to the injustice of the sentence nor want of power of the court, but to the malevolent antagonism of Satan, who, as in the case of job, is at certain times permitted to tempt an annoy mankind. So to be anathematized was comparable to being excommunicated, and this sentence is also described as malediction. Some researchers compare this to being formally cursed, and in the medieval and early modern era, it was believed that the people whose lives were being affected by these pests, they had to participate in the process in order for it to work. In the words of the Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E. P. Evans quote, the judicial process was preliminary to the utterance of the malediction and essential to its efficacy. Before fulminating an excommunication, the whole machinery of justice was put in motion in order to establish the guilt of the acut used, who were then warned, admonished, and threatened, and, in cases of obduracy, smitten with the anathema Maranatha, and devoted to utter destruction. As with all bands, charms, exorcisms, incantations, and other magical hocus pocus, the omission of any formality would vidiate the whole procedure, and by breaking the spell deprived the implication or interdiction of its occult virtue. Ecclesiastical thunder would thus be robbed of its fatal bolt and reduced to mere empty noise, the harmless explosion of a blank cartridge. So how did this play out in an actual case. One of the most famous examples was the trial of rats in the French diocese of Autune in fifteen twenty two. The rats had eaten and otherwise destroyed the barley crop, and the matter was taken up with the vicar. The rats were summoned to appear in court, but on their assigned day they did not arive. Bartholomew Chazenet had been appointed to represent the rats. He argued that they had failed to appear because their summons had been posted in only one place, and the rats lived all over the diocese and they were always moving around. So all the curates in the diocese were ordered to deliver this summons to the rats in all of their individual parishes. After this had been done on the designated day, the rats again did not appear for their court date, and Chazenet made a new argument that the defendants had the right to enough time to make arrangements and undertake such a journey. A new date was set for the trial, this time with a longer delay, so that the rats would have plenty of time to travel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rats still did not show up this time. Chazzenet argued that being summons to appear in court came with an implied promise that the defendant would arrive at court safely. He claimed that his clients were ready to appear, but were also very sure that if they tried to make their way to court, they would be set upon by cats on the way. In addition to the fact that rats are the natural prey of cats, these cats would be ones that belonged to the plaintiffs, and that gave the defendant rats even more cause to fear them. At that point, Cheesiney assured the ecclesiastical Court that his clients would appear if the plaintiffs were bonded under penalty to keep their cats from disturbing the traveling rats. Although the court seems to have been willing to order this at that point, the plaintiffs demurred, and the trial was adjourned with no plan to reconvene, meaning that the rats won by default. This probably seems absurd or at least silly. At least one paper used in the research for this episode, in my opinion, Credul puts forth that Chazzanet really did believe that his clients were going to appear in court only if these various stipulations were met. I am not sure whether there is some writing somewhere by Chazenet to suggest that that is true, but E. P. Evans has what I think is a more believable explanation quote. In view of the bad repute and notorious guilt of his clients, Shassinet was forced to employ all sorts of legal shifts and chicane dilatory please and other technical objections, hoping thereby to find some loophole in the meshes of the law through which the accused might escape, or at least to defer and mitigate the sentence of the judge. It's basically lawyering. Over the course of his career after this, Chasinet became a celebrated jurist in France, and from fifteen thirty one to fifteen forty one he served as the first president of the Parliament de Provence. That year, he also published a collection of consultations on law, and one of them was called the ex Communicacion and Emilium in Sectorum, which was a treatise on vermin trials. He also reportedly used some of the same strategies from the case with the rats in his cases involving human defendants. A fictionalized movie about his legal career was released in nineteen ninety three. It was titled The Hour of the Pig in the UK and The Advocate in the US, and it starred Colin Firth as Richard Courtois, which is the character who is based on Chasinet. I think when I realized this, I just said Colin Firth in all capital letters inside my head. Although the accounts that were part of this research don't mention any rats being physically brought into the court for this particular trial, some of the trials did involve a representative few of these animals being physically brought in, sometimes to hear the charges read and sometimes to be killed as the rest of their number were being anathematized. As one example, some leeches were brought to trial in Lausanne in fourteen fifty one they were there to hear the monitor read against them. When all the leeches in Las Aenne didn't leave is ordered, they were all anathematized. Similarly, some grasshoppers were indicted before the Tribunal de la Ficialite in the town of Arles in Provence in fifteen sixty five after eating the local crops. Their appointed representative, Matremurin, argued that they, like the people whose crops they were eating, had been created by God, and so they had the same right to food as the rest of God's creatures. In the words of Walter Woodburn Hyde in a nineteen sixteen paper titled the Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times quote but the opposing council cited the serpent in the Garden of Eden and sundry other animals of Holy writ which had incurred severe penalties. The grasshoppers were condemned and told to quit the region on pain of dire anathematization from the altar, which the church threatened to repeat until the last of the culprits had obeyed. The sentence of the court. The argument that the defendants are God's creatures, with a right to live was also put into play in a case involving termites at a Franciscan monastery in Brazil in seventeen thirteen. This is one of only a few cases in the Americas that appear in E. P. Evans's book The Monasteries. Monks, being highly annoyed by all the termites, went to the bishop. The bishops summoned the termites to an ecclesiastical tribunal. The lawyer who was appointed to defend the termites argued that they were God's creatures and praised them as being more industrious than the friars who were taking them to court. He also pointed out that the termites were justified in what they were doing, since they had been on the land before the friars arrived. In E. P. Evans's own words quote, the trial lasted for some time and called forth remarkable displays of legal learning and forensic eloquence, with numerous citations of sacred and profane authorities on both sides, and ended in a compromise by the terms of which the plaintiffs were obliged to provide a suitable reservation for the defendants, who were commanded to go thither and to remain henceforth within the prescribed limits. In the Chronicles of the Cloister, it is recorded under the date of January seventeen thirteen that no sooner was the order of the prolatic judge promulgated by being read officially before the hills of the termites, than they all came out and marched in columns to the place assigned. The Monkish analyst regards this prompt obedience as conclusive proof that the Almighty endorsed the decision of the court. Sometimes these trials also led to charges being filed against human beings. An ecclesiastical trial could be really time consuming and expensive, so sometimes people tried various charms or spells in the hope of getting rid of the offending pests themselves. But if they were caught doing this, they could be tried on charges of sorcery, and so could anybody who had sold them those unlicensed charms or exorcisms. Some of the writing on these trials over the last one hundred and fifty years or so has this tone of what exactly was going on here? Did people really think that grasshoppers or rats or leeches or termites or whatever we're going to respond to a summons to appear in court, and there's no clear consensus on the answer to this. Various people have argued that maybe people conceived of animals and their intellect and moral capacity just differently than we typically do today, or maybe this was a way for the church to reinforce tithing and belief among congregations. The process of anathematizing these animals was often accompanied by calls for the congregation to tithe and to participate in regular prayers. If the vermin left after all this, then the church could say that this had worked. But if they didn't leave, then it could be explained away as a lack of faith and prayer and tithing on the part of the people of the parish, or, as Chambers noted earlier, it could be because it was the work of Satan. This is one of the parallels to the witch trials of the early modern era. Often, the people who were targeted in witch trials really were not doing anything that might be construed as witchcraft. Instead, these trials often had a lot of other factors going on, including social unrest and hardship, and disasters like disease outbreaks or famines, and in some cases. The witch trials were at least in part, an effort to basically reinforce religion just authority. We're going to move on to animal trials that ended in execution rather than excommunication. After we paused for another sponsor break. We're going to finish off today's episode by talking about some of the cases that involved animals being sentenced to death. As we said at the top of the show, most of the time this was because the animal had been convicted of seriously injuring or killing somebody, but that was not always the case. In Basil, Switzerland, in fourteen seventy four, a rooster was tried and sentenced to death for having laid an egg. The concern was not just whether it was natural for a rooster to lay an egg. In the words of Chambers Book of Days, eggs legged by roosters were quote of inestimable value for mixing in certain magical preparations. Also, according to Chambers, a sorcerer would rather have a rooster's egg than a philosopher's stone. Other sources pointed out beliefs that an egg laid by a rooster could hatch into a cockatrice or a bathilisk. If it was incubated by a snake or a toad. The defense in this case argued that egg laying was involuntary, so it was not punishable by law. The defense also argued that if sorcery was involved in this, that would be the work of the sorcerer and not the rooster. Also, animals were thought of as brutes, and Satan did not make compacts with brutes, but Satan could possess them, as happened in biblical accounts of pigs possessed by demons. Eventually, the rooster was convicted not as an animal, but as a sorcerer or a heretic in the form of a rooster. The rooster was sentenced to one of the same forms of execution as Hugh and heretics were, which was being burned at the stake along with that egg. Even when these cases were carried out through secular courts, they often had a religious underpinning in the laws and the reasoning involved. We mentioned earlier that a passage from the Book of Exodus was sometimes seen as justification for sentencing animals to death. Other passages in the books of Genesis and Leviticus were also seen as justifying death sentences for specific crimes purportedly committed by animals. This included sentencing animals to death after they had been used for the purpose of sorcery or witchcraft, so that defense's argument about sorcery in the case of the rooster seems like it might have been kind of risky. This idea that animals used in witchcraft were to be sentenced to death also contributed to animals being killed during witch trials across Europe and the Americas, under the belief that these animals were the witches. Familiar in those cases, though it was typically the person who was being placed on trial, not the animal. The Book of Leviticus also included a mandate to kill both the human perpetrator and the animal victim in cases of bestiality. E. P. Evans's book mentions a series of cases in which both the human assailant and the animal victim were killed, as well as one case in Vanvas, France in seventeen fifty in which a man was sentenced to death but a donkey was acquitted on the ground that she was the victim of the violence and not a participant of her own free will. The parish priest and several people from the town signed a statement that they had known the donkey for years end quote, that she had always shown herself to be virtuous and well behaved, both at home and abroad, and had never given occasion of scandal to anyone, and that therefore they were willing to bear witness that she is, in word and deed, and in all her habits of life, a most honest creature. Some of the secular animal trials involved horses, oxen, cows, or other large animals that kicked or trampled or otherwise hurt somebody, but most of the defendants were pigs. Although some of today's pig breeds are small, in general, pigs are very large, and they are known for basically eating anything they can find. Domestic pigs in medieval and early modern Europe could also be very big, and their behavior could be even more unpredictable because sometimes they enter bred with wild boares, and in a lot of places pigs were free ranging without any kind of enclosure. They're natural foragers and opportunistic eaters, so they'd basically wander around eating whatever they happened to find. Sadly, this could include unattended babies and children. In most of these cases, the pigs involved were charged with implying that they had the intellect and moral capacity to intentionally decide to kill someone. The first such trial of a pig is often cited as having taken place in Fontinet au Jrouse, France, which is today a suburb of Paris, and that happened in either twelve sixty six or twelve sixty eight. There's an eighteenth century record of this that refers back to an unnamed thirteenth century work, but it doesn't actually specify that there was a trial involved. It does say that a pig had been apprehended after killing a child and that it was publicly burned at the stake, with the child's parents included among the spectators. French accounts use the word cor or court, which ep evans work interprets as being a court of law, but it could have also just meant a courtyard or even the town square. Evans also may have taken some liberties in some of the details that he included in another trial, and that was one that took place in thirteen eighty six in Falaise, France, again involving a pig that had killed a child. This pig was hanged, which was one of the methods that was used of execution for animals pretty often. But Evans's account also says that this pig was first injured in the same way that it had injured the child, and that it was dressed in a suit of clothes like a person for the trial, But primary sources don't mention that. They only talk about the cost of the execution, which included buying a new pair of gloves for the executioner. It was customary to present executioners with a new pair of gloves, regardless of whether they were executing a person or a non human animal. This was sort of a metaphorical representation of the executioner's hands being clean after carrying out this task. In fourteen fifty seven, a sow and her six piglets were also tried for murder in seven years Etangue in Bourgogne, France. In this case, the sow was sentenced to death by hanging, but the piglets were spared because the court found no clear evidence that they had been involved in the baby's death and that their mother had set a bad example. To be clear, there are some limitations on what we know about all these trials. They attracted the interest of a number of historians and commentators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One was Edward Payson Evans, whose book we've quoted from several times. This book was expanded out from two essays that he had published in the Atlantic in eighteen eighty four. We've already mentioned a couple of places where he might have misinterpreted something or embellished some details. Beyond that, he was primarily focused on cases in which animals were convicted, and it's not totally clear whether that's because animals were usually convicted or because people just didn't feel the need to keep as much documentation about acquittals. There also hasn't been a lot of research to determine if these trials were really concentrated primarily in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, or if that's just where Evans spent most of his time. His text doesn't always have enough information to actually track down his primary sources, so some of the trials that he mentions and some of the details cannot really be substantiated. Evans was an early animal rights activist, and this work is definitely influenced by his personal opinions about these animals and the people who carried the whole thing out, namely that they were cruel and barbarous, and that people in his era were a lot more rational. Some aspects of this also just seem hard to believe, even with a bunch of caveats about changing ideas around law and ethics and religion and animal consciousness. And there are four sure multiple works of fiction and satire that either are based on or referencing these kinds of trials. Like William Hohane, who also printed actual trial transcripts, published a couple of satirical works about a dog being put on trial for biting his lord. There's also Edward Long's seventeen seventy one, The Trial of Farmer Carter's Dog Porter for Murder, taken down verbatim at litterum when shorthand and now published by authority from the corrected manuscript of councilor Clearpoint. This satirical work was also meant as a commentary on game laws. That's one about the termite trial sounds almost like it could be a metaphor for colonialism. It is at least possible that some of the trials in Evans's compilation were meant to be satire or jokes or metaphors or something else. It all leads to the obvious question of was this for real? And the answer is probably, at least to some extent. Various historians who have studied these trials have concluded that it's possible that some accounts are apocryphal or fabricated, or that satire may have been misunderstood as facts somewhere along the line, or that some details have been embellished. But there are also just too many accounts of these trials, spread out over too long a time and too large a geographic area for them all to have been made up. There's also enough variation in the specifics that it's probably not just the early modern version of an urban legend, and some of these trials do have supporting documents, like court records or receipts for paying the executioner, and those records generally don't suggest that anything out of the ordinary was going on animal trials. Do you have listener mail that may or may not be odd? I do have some listener mail. I don't think it's odd at all. This email is from Anika. I'm sorry if I have said your name incorrectly and the email reads Hi, Tracy and Holly, one of my ancestors is credited with quote discovering Mammoth Cave. Of course, there are questions about exactly which John Howchins was the quote discoverer, and as we know, the actual discoverers were the First Nation's peoples who lived in the area for thousands of years. And then what follows is a story on John Houchins and the bear quote. Although the credit of the cave's discovery belongs to the prehistoric Native Americans, the question remains as to how the cave came to the attention of European settlers in the area. According to legend, in the late seventeen nineties, a young boy named John Howchins was out hunting for game for his family. He spotted a black bear roaming through the forest near the entrance of the cave. He took aim and fired. His shot failed to be fatal to the bear, only wounding the animal. The injured bear ran down the hill and took shelter in the cave, leading Houchens into the cave. The legend tapers off at this point, leaving unanswered the question of whether Houchin's ever got his bear, but whether or not Howchin's gained the credit of the modern discovery of the Great Cave. There's a section of the cave called Houchin's Narrows, name for him. There's Houchin's Ferry or the Green River in the Mammoth Cave National Park next to Houchen's campground, and there's the Howchins family Cemetery. Some of my ancestors are buried there. I've always wanted to travel down to the area, particularly the river. I steer clear of caves after my one and only foray into a cave in northern New York in the nineteen seventies where I was nearly trapped in a tube formation called the gun barrel, which was a very tight squeeze. I became stuck, and it was only when I realized that I had gotten in just fine that I just needed to relax to pull myself out. I'm here to tell the tale of it. So there you are. Proof is attached. That's me on the right, just heading into the gun barrel. They have since cemented up the gun barrel and made an opening that you can walk through because someone died in it by the way that cave is called Skull Cave Anika, and then it says you'll be happy to know I stopped doing stupid things at about age sixty four, which made me laugh. So yes, this story of someone named John Howchin's being the discover of Mammoth Cave is one of the stories about who the first non indigenous person was. And I did not get into that in our episode about Mammoth Cave because there are kind of multiple competing stories and competing descriptions of exactly which person this was, because there are you know, there are quite a lot of people named John in the United States, and various spellings for Houchin's which can also sometimes show up in records as Hutchins and other things. We have a picture and this is an incredibly narrow space in the cave that needed to be crawled through. So thank you so much for this email, a chance to talk a little bit about those stories about who discovered Bammoth Cave. And one last animal injury. If for the episode in the story of being out hunting a bear, it I don't love the idea of following a bear into a cave, but that's the story there. If you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast where a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. That is the email address that you should use if you would like to reach us. Sometimes people have recently been trying to make things difficult for themselves and like tracking down personal social media accounts. I'm just gonna tell you, if you send me a message on like Instagram, I'm not gonna see that in a timely manner. But I do look at history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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