26 Quirky Animals Involved in Crimes

In the 1500s, France found itself involved in an unusual court case. The defendant? Weevils, a type of small beetle with a big appetite. In 1587, the insects were damaging the vineyards around St. Julien, France, leading the town to put them on trial. The weevils’ lawyer argued that God had created the beetles and provided them with proper sustenance. The prosecution countered that the weevils were meant to be subordinate to humans. This case, like other ecclesiastical trials of the past, was likely less about punishing the hungry beetles and more about addressing a general fear of lawlessness during uncertain times. The citizens of St. Julien decided to offer a plot of land to the weevils, but the defense attorney rejected it, claiming it didn’t provide enough food for the insects. The final result of the trial is unknown because, in an odd twist of fate, the last page of the court records was destroyed—perhaps by vengeful weevils!

Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of MentalFloss.com, and welcome to The List Show from my living room. Those 16th-century insects are just one case of animals involved in quirky crimes I’m going to share with you today.

Not every animal accused of a crime has been able to avoid time behind bars. In 2008, police in Chiapas, Mexico, arrested a donkey after it bit one man in the chest and kicked another. The donkey spent three days in jail—in a cell usually reserved for intoxicated individuals—and wasn’t released until its owners paid for the victims’ medical bills and covered their salaries for the days they missed work due to their injuries. As officer Sinar Gomez said, “Around here, if someone commits a crime, they are jailed—no matter who they are.”

That’s not the only time donkeys have faced consequences. In Orai, India, eight donkeys served jail time for munching on nearly $1,000 worth of saplings that had been planted near a local jail as part of a community cleanup campaign. The donkeys’ poor meal choice earned them four days in jail. Fortunately for them, their owner enlisted some powerful help to ensure their freedom. After unsuccessfully pleading for their release, he persuaded a politician to accompany him to the jail and secure the donkeys’ freedom in exchange for a promise to keep a closer eye on them.

In 2016, a goat was arrested in Janakpur, India, for a similar crime. After the goat nibbled on some flowers from the district magistrate’s garden, both the animal and its owner were arrested. They were eventually released on bond.

As it turns out, India’s police have made quite a few animal arrests. In 2015, they detained a pigeon in the town of Manwal, near the Pakistani border—an area that had long suffered political tensions between the two countries. After a teenage boy discovered a strange message stamped on the bird’s body, he brought it to the local police station. Because the message was written in Urdu, the officers opted to keep the bird in their custody, suspecting it may have been a spy.

Just a few years earlier, in 2011, the situation was reversed: This time, it was Pakistani officers who detained an animal that had wandered over from India. A monkey was found roaming the town of Bahawalpur and was captured and detained by authorities for trespassing—though some speculated that it may have been related to the pigeon incident. The monkey was placed in a zoo, where it feasted on fruit and delighted curious visitors. While it doesn’t seem that anyone thought the monkey was a trained spy, I probably would watch an all-monkey reboot of James Bond.

Not every accused monkey was given such a cushy sentence, though. In 2004, a city in India was troubled by a particularly problematic primate. The monkey stole food from people’s houses, threatened children, and even swiped a person’s math textbooks and calculator. To put an end to the disturbances, local authorities placed the animal in a barred cell built in the corner of a zoo specifically reserved for misbehaving monkeys. A sign outside the tiny jail read, “These monkeys have been caught from various cities of Punjab. They are notorious. Going near them is dangerous.”

A monkey has also been arrested in Florida, though that animal, a capuchin named Mookie, was able to serve his sentence at home. After Mookie bit a man on the shin in a parking lot outside a convenience store, he was placed under a 30-day house arrest—a quarantine imposed to ensure the primate wouldn’t show signs of rabies. Mookie wound up being rabies-free and is believed to have bitten the man because he was startled. Sadly, Mookie’s mandatory isolation forced his owner to cancel the beach party he had been planning for the monkey’s upcoming 20th birthday, but all was not lost. On the eve of his release, Mookie celebrated with his owner, Brad Berman, and 20 family members. They shared a vanilla-frosted cake with Mookie’s picture on it and enjoyed some cheese pizza.

It’s important to keep our animal friends happy, and in 2008, Switzerland introduced a rule to ensure that—at least in one particular case. The unusual animal rights law made it illegal to own just one guinea pig at a time. Why? The little guys can otherwise get lonely.

One unfortunate creature got itself in trouble not for physical violence, but for verbal abuse. In 2015, police in the Indian state of Maharashtra arrested a parrot named Hariyal. The very vocal bird had picked up a habit of cursing at an elderly woman. She was in the middle of a nasty property dispute with her stepson, and she believed the parrot had picked up its foul habit from him. Supposedly, the man had spent two years training Hariyal to verbally abuse his stepmother whenever she passed by. He and the bird were summoned to the police station, where the parrot was detained and later handed over to the Maharashtra forestry department.

Let’s take a look at another case of a loud-mouthed parrot, this time in Colombia. A drug cartel had trained a bird named Lorenzo to be their lookout. Whenever police happened to go near the cartel’s headquarters, Lorenzo would scream for the men to run. In 2010, when police finally managed to sneak around Lorenzo and avoid triggering his warning call, they discovered a cache of drugs and weapons, as well as other lookout birds.

Avian security systems aren’t limited to Colombia. In 2019, a bird living in a Brazilian community called Vila Irmã Dulce was trained to shout “Mom, the police!” whenever officers got too close. Authorities discovered the bird during a raid on a drug den. The animal’s owners had no need to worry about their loyal lookout snitching on them—the bird didn’t make a peep after its capture.

A bird ended up at the center of another case in February 2014. Hira, a parrot, was apparently the only witness to the murder of Neelam Sharma. Hira didn’t outright reveal the killer’s name, but Neelam’s widower, Vijay, noticed that the bird became extremely agitated whenever his nephew visited the house or even when his name was mentioned. According to some reports, after Vijay mentioned this to the police, his nephew confessed to the crime. Sadly for Hira, his help in solving the case went largely unnoticed: The police later downplayed his involvement, and the local news reported his name as Hercule the Parrot.

In 2013, prison guards spotted a white cat creeping around the gates of the medium-security prison they guarded in Arapiraca, Brazil. The cat was a familiar face around the property—the inmates may have raised it—but this time, something was off: Tape was wrapped around the animal’s body. Upon closer examination, the guards found saws, drills, a phone and charger, a memory card, batteries, and an earphone stuck to the tape. Authorities couldn’t figure out which prisoner had been attempting to use the feline as an accomplice to a jailbreak, and the cat was briefly detained before being transported to an animal shelter.

Prisoners in Russia had a similar idea. In 2013, authorities captured a cat after discovering it was being used to smuggle phones and chargers into a prison near Syktyvkar. One day, while the cat sat atop a fence, the officers noticed the electronics taped to its stomach and detained it.

Sometimes, rather than committing the crimes, cats help solve them. In 1989, when a pet shop worker named Lori Auker’s body was discovered three weeks after she went missing, police began to investigate her estranged husband, Robert Auker. Despite the fact that Robert had meticulously cleaned his car and that it went through multiple owners after his father traded it in following Lori’s disappearance, forensic workers were still able to discover fur that matched the victim’s two cats. The same fur was also found on a splint Robert had worn the very same day Lori vanished. With other evidence also implicating him, Robert was convicted. Turns out, cat fur’s tendency to cling to everything isn’t always such a bad thing—unless you’re trying to get away with a crime.

In a case with decidedly lower stakes, a wild beaver took a little unsanctioned trip to a dollar store in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, back in December 2016. Rather than browse for cheap holiday knick-knacks, the beaver wandered around the store, knocking things to the ground. The local sheriff’s department arrested the rowdy patron and then released it to a wildlife rehabilitation center.

In 2008, a bear in Macedonia raided a beekeeper’s hives and stole his honey. The beekeeper blasted music to scare the repeat offender away, but that didn’t deter it from stopping by and stealing a sticky snack once the music stopped. The bear failed to show up to court to answer for its actions and was eventually found guilty of theft and damage. Because no one owned the wild animal, the government was ordered to pay the beekeeper the equivalent of $3,500 for the damages it caused to his hives.

In 2017, a different bear got off scot-free after vandalizing and stealing a Subaru in Durango, Colorado. The bear broke into the SUV, tore the steering wheel off, pulled the radio out of the dashboard, broke the rear window, and used the car as its own personal toilet. Then, the animal somehow released the parking brake, causing the car to roll backward and crash into a mailbox and a few utility boxes. After causing extensive damage, the furry vandal fled the scene of the crime.

In Canada, police had the opposite problem: Instead of dealing with an animal that fled the scene of the crime, they had to deal with one that wouldn’t leave their crime scene alone. A bird believed to be a crow named Canuck had already earned a reputation as a beloved troublemaker in Vancouver. In 2016, his antics got him in a tussle with the law. When police were dispatched to a car fire, they encountered a man wielding a knife. Canuck, who had been spotted sitting on the burned car, scooped up the knife and flew away with it. A cop had to chase him for a bit before the bird finally dropped his shiny evidential treasure.

In 2010, a fox went on a crime spree in the German town of Foehren, snatching people’s footwear and stashing it in her den, perhaps for her kits to play with. In May 2018, a police station in the Japanese city of Nagaokakyo received calls from eight households saying that shoes had vanished from outside their houses overnight. A police stakeout revealed that a pair of foxes had been snatching people’s sandals from their porches. Officers followed the duo back to their den, where they discovered 40 pairs of sandals. It’s believed the foxes were hoarding the shoes not to beef up their wardrobe, but as a result of an instinct to stock up on food and other items while building their nests. Rather than arrest the foxes for the thefts, police officers sent out leaflets advising people to start storing their shoes inside.

Instead of stuffing their treasures underground, some foxes opt to share their contraband goods. In 2014, a woman in Leeds, England, reported that a fox had been dropping shoes off in her back garden for months, at one point bringing her new items each day. She installed a shoe rack outside her house so neighbors could come reclaim their footwear.

Speaking of returning stolen goods to neighbors, a family in Southampton, England, found themselves in the awkward position of amassing a collection of other people’s underwear. Oscar, their 13-year-old foster cat, had developed a habit of stealing people’s intimates from their clothing lines, including at least 10 pairs of underwear, among other items like socks and rubber gloves, and proudly gifting them to his humans. Afraid the community would suspect a panty pilferer with more perverted motives, Oscar’s humans turned him into the police. Fortunately for Oscar, he wasn’t arrested, and his foster family opted to adopt him.

Steven the seagull is another repeat offender. For years, Steven would wander into a Scottish bakery and steal items off the shelves, a routine he’d developed ever since the store opened. He was a pretty bold thief—he would visit the store upwards of 10 times each day. Steven was particularly fond of chips and gained internet fame after pictures of him deftly snatching a bag of salt and vinegar chips went viral.

We’ll leave you where we started off: with insects. A wild grasshopper was the key to solving a 1985 murder in Texas. Investigators uncovered little physical evidence at the scene of the crime. They did, however, find a grasshopper with a missing limb on the victim’s clothes. They later discovered a severed insect leg stuck to the cuff of a suspect’s pants. The leg was matched to the grasshopper, which led to the suspect’s conviction.

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