Whenever the weather has turned hot in London in recent years, it's never taken long for some newspaper columnist or dinner party guest to remind us all that the high temperatures and passenger densities regularly reached in London Underground trains are, according to European law, unfit for transporting farmyard animals. Whether this be true or apocryphal, its a good conversation starter because almost everyone — Tube-haters, animal-lovers and Europhobes (and most Britons probably belong to all three groups) — can nod in earnest agreement.
Now this story from The Economist (subscribers only, I fear) brings an interesting parallel story from the US, this time less about our modern way life than about a modern (and particularly American) way of death.
Topsy the elephant of Coney Island, NY, was electrocuted a hundred years ago for killing three men. Her quick, silent death led Thomas Edison (the brains behind the whole scheme) to lobby NY politicians to introduce electrocution for human criminals — and, of course, many American states still use this method today. Except that electrocution is now considered inhumane for elephants and no longer used for them.
Thus flows the strange and tortured logic of state-sponsored execution.
Posted by timo at July 27, 2003 11:35 AM | TrackBack