This Bear Was Framed

You've committed a murder, and quite reasonably wish to get off scott-free. You might try hiding the body or use a Frame-Up to beat the rap, but if your inclination is to Make It Look Like an Accident, why not simply make it look like an animal attack? The accused animal is unlikely to put up a legal defense, and the typical bites and claw marks from such an encounter will cover up any pesky stab wounds, and will appear to be so open-and-shut a case that the authorities might not even bother testing for poisons or gunshot residue. Or better yet, why not make the crime seamless by using an actual animal to commit the murder?

The catch is that some animal lover (or unusually perceptive detective) may come along and try to Clear His Name. Compare Animal Assassin, where the killer uses an animal as a weapon to kill the victim.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of This Bear Was Framed include:

Comic Books

• The Dresden Files graphic novel "Welcome to the Jungle" starts with a zoo security guard being found dead outside the gorilla pen, with blood on one of the gorillas. Finding it odd that a murderous animal would, after breaking out of its pen and killing a man, then proceed to go back into its cage and re-secure the doors, Murphy calls in Dresden to figure out what really happened.

Films -- Animation

• In The Lion King, Scar uses stampeding wildebeests to murder Mufasa -- an odd example of an animal using other animals to make the murder of another animal look like an (accidental) animal attack.

Films -- Live-Action

• The Advocate is a film based on a lawyer in Medieval France who defends a pig for killing a child. It's based on some real trials of animals that occurred during that time period. Yes, the pig was framed.

Literature

• The Sherlock Holmes adventure "The Hound of the Baskervilles", seeks to pin a murder on a canine apparition!! Though the dog wasn't exactly framed. It was the murder weapon, rather than the actual murderer.

Live-Action TV

• This is a somewhat regular thing on the trope-namer, Psych, where it seems like once every few seasons there is an episode where an animal is falsely accused of being "the killer" and in danger of being "put down" for it (in one it was a panther, another the trope-naming polar bear, and in still another a shark), but the series sleuths uncover evidence that a person did the killing and then covered it up by making it look like a death by animal attack.
• Monk
  • "Mr. Monk and the Panic Room": A monkey is framed for murder. It is then up to Monk to figure out how.
  • Another Monk example is an episode where a dog had apparently mauled a woman to death. The bite marks on the woman's body matched the dog's teeth exactly, but the owner claimed the dog had died before the apparent attack.
• In an episode of New Tricks a man broke into a zoo and was assumed to have fallen into a tiger enclosure and mauled to death by the tiger. When the tiger dies a few years later it is revealed that its death was caused by a piece of a knife that was stuck in its body since that night. The team reopens the case and finds that the man was killed elsewhere and the body dumped in the tiger cage which is when th tiger was stabbed. Not only was the tiger framed but it was also another victim.
• In one CSI episode, a woman (who was eating human organs to fight off a rare disease) used dogs to attack her victims, so that the deaths at first simply looked like dog attacks.
• The Columbo episode "A Matter of Honor" has one of these, where Columbo is stuck on a Busman's Holiday in Mexico. The perp is a bullfighter (played by Ricardo Montalban) who kills his victim by trapping him in the arena with a notoriously vicious bull.
• A dog is framed in the pilot of Pushing Daisies. The cause of death was in fact being mauled, but it was done by a dog of a different breed on orders from its owner.
• An episode of Midsomer Murders has a killer use a saber tooth tiger skull to make marks on the body to hide the real cause of death.
• Happens in a NCIS episode, with a serial killer masking his murders in a natural park as accidents -- includig a grizzly attack. The bear sure did partially eat the corpse, but during the autopsy Ducky finds a stab wound in the heart that is too neat to have been done by bear claws.

Myths & Religion

• In The Bible story of Joseph and the coat of many colors, Joseph's jealous brothers sell Joseph into slavery to passing traders; to cover up this crime, they smear goat's blood on Joseph's robe and show it to their father, claiming it is the result of an animal attack.

Real Life

• The famous Australian case of Azaria Chamberlain, an infant who disappeared in the desert during a family outing. Her mother claimed, "a dingo ate my baby"; the authorities invoked this trope and the mother was convicted of murder, but the conviction was later reversed. More modern scientific analysis of the evidence available, while inconclusive, supports the mother's version of events.