Classifying animals to better appropriate them. Milestones for a Roman " legal zoology 

Why does the 2010 Rural Code specify that poultry and other farmyard animals remain our property even if we have lost sight of them ? This is an implicit legacy of Roman law, which distinguishes between animals whose ownership we retain once and for all, and animals over which our control is exercised only as long as we retain physical control, if only through our gaze. To achieve this result, an articulated taxonomy of animals appears in the texts of Roman jurists. It begins by distinguishing between wild and domesticated animals, then proceeds to make other distinctions, the richness and nuances of which will be demonstrated in the lecture. In this taxonomy, zoological, morphological and ethological criteria coexist with economic considerations, careful to measure the role of each animal in the Roman economy. It's a classification by which jurists cast their conceptual net over the animal kingdom. But it's also a fruitful and little-explored way of understanding the Roman mentality towards the living world, and of tracing its traces down to the present day.