The law is not only concerned with things of high intrinsic value. Occasionally people sue over items whose worth is high but not immediately obvious. In the case of Daniel Bennett, the item is 5s 7lbs of lizard excrement. Bennett is suing the University of Leeds for having disposed of the animal waste after he had meticulously collected it from remote areas in the Philippines as part of his doctoral research.

For seven years Bennett engaged in a painstaking investigation into the diet, life, and behaviour of Varanus olivaceus, the very rare butaan lizard. His primary empirical evidence is in the form of the faeces that he collected from the jungle. After years of work for his doctoral thesis, Bennett had become an expert in his field. “I knew more about lizard faeces than I had ever thought possible,” he declared. Giving background to the intensity of his loss, and the nature of the alleged negligence by his university, Bennett explained that he obtained his doctoral scholarship to pursue his study at Leeds “after five years of shit-searching”.

Following an extended period engaged in fieldwork, Bennett returned to Leeds from abroad to find another student was occupying his desk space. He testified to the shock in seeing that while his personal effects had been carefully stowed in boxes “there was no sign of my 35kg bag of lizard shit”. It might have been the largest collection of lizard faeces anywhere in the world, he noted, and added, “Its loss left me reeling and altered the course of my life forever”.

Bennett discovered that in the course of a space-saving measure, laboratory technicians had accidentally taken away all his biological evidence and incinerated it. He waited 16 months for a formal response from Leeds but when it eventually arrived it offered only £500 compensation and an assurance that new protocols would ensure the same sort of thing would not happen again. It was then that the writ hit the fan.

Bennett’s bag of lost material carries particular significance because the hard-won evidence would be so immensely difficult to replace. The butaan is an extremely reclusive creature and the species is very difficult to locate. If the lizards encounter humans they never return to that area. The damages Bennett would stand to win are considerable and would include money to reflect the loss sustained by the destruction of property used in the course of his professional work, and possibly any consequential shock.

In 1938, the Court of Appeal recognised that compensation could, in principle, be awarded to someone who suffered shock from witnessing the loss of “something less important than human life”. The court used the example of a “beloved dog”. Whether that principle would extend to the biological matter lost in this case remains to be seen. It is new territory as people usually sue when the defendant’s action has left them in the muck, not without it.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University

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