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English Today, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2003), Cambridge University Press

"English and Speciesism"
Joan Dunayer

Standard English usage perpetuates speciesism, which is the failure to accord nonhuman animals equal consideration and respect. Like racism or sexism, speciesism is a form of prejudice sustained in part by biased, misleading words. However, whereas racist slurs rightly elicit censure, people regularly use, and fail to notice, speciesist language. Unlike sexist language, speciesist language remains socially acceptable even to people who view themselves as progressive. Speciesism pervades our language, from scholarly jargon to street slang. Considered in relation to the plight of nonhuman beings, the words of feminist poet Adrienne Rich express a terrible absolute: "This is the oppressor’s language."

Speciesist usage denigrates or discounts nonhuman animals. For example, terming nonhumans "it" erases their gender and groups them with inanimate things. Referring to them as "something" (rather than "someone") obliterates their sentience and individuality. Pure speciesism leads people to call a brain-dead human "who" but a conscious pig "that" or "which.'

Current usage promotes a false dichotomy between humans and nonhumans. Separate lexicons suggest opposite behaviors and attributes. We eat, but other animals feed. A woman is pregnant or nurses her babies; a nonhuman mammal gestates or lactates. A dead human is a corpse, a dead nonhuman a carcass or meat.

Everyday speech denies human-nonhuman kinship. We aren’t animals, primates, or apes. When we do admit to being animals, we label other animals "lower" or "subhuman." Dictionary definitions of man exaggerate human uniqueness and present characteristics typical of humans (such as verbal ability) as marks of superiority, especially superior intelligence.

Nonhuman-animal epithets insult humans by invoking contempt for other species: rat, worm, viper, goose. The very word animal conveys opprobrium. Human, in contrast, signifies everything worthy. Like the remark that a woman has "the mind of a man," the comment that a nonhuman is "almost human" is assumed to be praise. Both condescend.

While boasting of "human kindness," our species treats nonhumans with extreme injustice and cruelty. Directly or indirectly, most humans routinely participate in needless harm to other animals, especially their captivity and slaughter. Whereas true vegetarianism (veganism) promotes human health and longevity, consumption of animal-derived food correlates with life-threatening conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and hardening of the arteries. Still, our language suggests that humans must eat products from nonhuman bodies. As if we possessed a carnivore's teeth and digestive tract, thoughtless cliché places us "at the top of the food chain."

To speciesists, needless killing is murder only if the victim is human. In animal "farming" and numerous other forms of institutionalized speciesism, nonhuman animals literally are slaves: they’re held in servitude as property. But few people speak of nonhuman "enslavement." Many who readily condemn human victimization as "heinous" or "evil" regard moralistic language as sensational or overly emotional when it is applied to atrocities against nonhumans. They prefer to couch nonhuman exploitation and murder in culinary, recreational, or other nonmoralistic terms. That way they avoid acknowledging immorality. Among others, Nazi vivisectors used the quantitative language of experimentation for human, as well as nonhuman, vivisection. Slaveholders have used the economic language of farming for nonhuman and human enslavement. Why is such morally detached language considered offensive and grotesque only with regard to the human victims?

The media rarely acknowledge nonhuman suffering. Only human misfortune garners strong words like tragic and terrible. When thousands of U.S. cattle, left in the blazing sun on parched land, die from heat and lack of water, reporters note the losses "suffered" by their enslavers.

Belittling words minimize nonhuman suffering and death. As expressed in a New York magazine caption, antivivisectionists "oppose testing on any creature—even a mouse." The word even ranks a mouse below humans in sensitivity and importance. There's no reason to believe that mice experience deprivation and pain less sharply than we do or value their lives less, but our language removes them from moral consideration. Who cares if millions of mice and rats are vivisected each year? They're "only rodents." What does it matter if billions of chickens live in misery until they die in pain and fear? They’re "just chickens."

In speciesism's fictitious world, nonhumans willingly participate in their own victimization. They "give" their lives in vivisection and the food industry.

Further belying victimization, the language of speciesist exploitation renders living animals mindless and lifeless. They’re "crops," "stock," hunting "trophies," and vivisection "tools."

Category labels born of exploitation imply that nonhuman beings exist for our use. Furbearer tags a nonhuman person a potential pelt. Circus animal suggests some natural category containing hoop-jumping tigers and dancing bears, nonhumans of a "circus" type. The verbal trick makes deprivation and coercion disappear.

Evil gathers euphemisms. Over millennia, speciesism has compiled a hefty volume. Wildlife management sanctions the bureaucratized killing of free-living nonhumans. Leather and pork serve as comfortable code for skin and flesh. Domestication softens captivity, subjugation, and forced breeding.

Positive words glamorize humans' ruthless genetic manipulation of other species. Horses inbred for racing are "thoroughbreds." However afflicted with disabilities, dogs inbred for human pleasure and use are "purebreds," while the fittest mixed-breed dogs are "mongrels" and "mutts."

With complimentary self-description, humans exonerate themselves of wrongdoing. Food-industry enslavement and slaughter cause suffering and death of colossal magnitude. Yet, consumers of flesh, eggs, and nonhuman milk count themselves among "animal lovers."

Currently, misleading language legitimizes and conceals the institutionalized abuse of nonhuman animals. With honest, unbiased words, we can grant them the freedom and respect that are rightfully theirs.

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Joan Dunayer is a writer whose publications include articles on language and animal rights. Her work has appeared in journals, magazines, college English textbooks, and anthologies. A former college English instructor, she has master’s degrees in English education, English literature, and psychology. She is the author of Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (Derwood, Maryland: Ryce Publishing, 2001, distributed by Lantern Books), the first book on speciesism and language.

"If you will forgive me I will reproduce two of my (published) responses to questions from reporters, some of whom had a difficult time understanding what we were talking about when we said that certain words such as "beast," "wild animal," etc. were not to be used in articles that were submitted to the Journal because they referred to animals in a now outdated stereotypical manner.

The response that this little notice in a scholarly Journal generated was absolutely astounding to Andrew and me. In a word, it went viral. Some people, of course, knew exactly what we were talking about and were very sympathetic. Others were not sympathetic and wrote incredibly nasty e-mails. Some of the nasty emails were written by people who claimed to love their dog or cat very much and apparently resented the fact that the Journal did not approve of the word "pet." It was encouraging that so many people said they loved their "pet," but discouraging that they were so aggressively insulting while absurdly assuming that we claimed the dog or cat him or her self would be insulted by this language.

Below are the published excerpts.

Some pundits in the U.S. (and perhaps the U.K.?) might argue that you are taking “political correctness” too far with your preferred terms for animals and their caregivers. What would be your response?

This is not "political correctness." Many of the terms used to refer to animals in the past such as 'brute,' 'beast,' 'wild animal' carry connotations that are outdated to say the least. We are merely trying to get people to think about animals as they are. For instance, we now know from scientists who have spent hours observing them, that elephants have a complex social system and that they have a communication system that was unknown only a few years ago. Similarly, we now know much more about the social structure of wolves, how they establish a peaceful, social hierarchy without fighting and that in general they are not the blood-thirsty wild beasts that many people imagine. We know now that a number of animal species make and use tools; we are learning about the language abilities of chimpanzees, grey parrots, etc.

In other words, there has been an explosion of knowledge about animals that should make us consider them in a new light and perhaps change the manner in which we treat them. The language we use shapes our concepts at least to some extent. Think of the different conceptions that arise if a man refers to a (human) female as a "hot chick," a "lady," a "woman" a "cougar," a "fox," etc.

- Why is this debate important? -

Many of us think that our treatment of sentient animals is cruel, particularly animals raised for food, but also free roaming animals like the horses in the west, the prairie dogs whose population has been reduced by 90% by poisoning despite the fact that their behavior encourages the growth of new grass, that scientists consider them to be a keystone species, etc. They are actually a benefit to the environment and to a number of other species, but they continue to be poisoned by the millions.

Even if one does not care about cruelty, the overcrowding of food animals necessitates the over-use of antibiotics and allows bacteria to become drug resistant and thus a threat to human health. So called factory farms have huge environmental impacts such as the pollution of streams and rivers, etc. Social scientists as well as police are now aware of the link between animal abuse and anti-social behavior, particularly spousal abuse and abuse of children. I have mentioned only a few reasons why we should care and why a discussion of our treatment of animals is important for us as well as for them.

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We do indeed think that many of the words used to describe animals are derogatory, biased, and stereotypical or give only a partial picture. Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition, defines "pest" as "something resembling a pest in destructiveness; esp.; a plant or animal detrimental to humans or human concerns (as agriculture or livestock production)" or "one that pesters or annoys." People commonly refer to animals such as raccoons that get into garbage, deer that nibble on flowers or birds that eat the seeds planted by farmers as pests. Any animal that interferes in any way with any human undertaking can be called a pest including a neighbor's dog. It is a completely arbitrary classification. This derogatory word is used as if it were an innate quality of the animal, rather than a word describing the animal's behavior in relation to certain human practices. The implication is that if an animal is a pest, he can be destroyed without any further thought, yet not all humans view raccoons, deer, birds or dogs as pests. Similarly, the word "vermin" carries the same connotation if not worse since vermin are usually said to carry disease. Surely these are not complimentary or even neutral terms.

Yes, although legally true we object to the word "owner" because the only thing that can be owned is property. For the most part, property, even intellectual property, refers to what is inanimate. We can do almost anything we like with property. Sentient beings such as animals are unlike any other kind of property. If animals are viewed as human property, it means that in a conflict the owner almost always has the upper hand. If we think of animals as our property, we tend to forget that they are individuals with feelings, needs and desires. How many people consider the feelings of a cow separated from her newborn calf or shipped to slaughter when her milk production decreases?

We also object to the expression "wild animal" because it carries the connotation of ferocity. The common understanding of a wild animal is a bloodthirsty animal that wants to eat us. If, however, "wild animals" simply refer to animals that are not domesticated, then mice are wild animals as are rabbits and birds. Most people would laugh at the characterization of a mouse or of a "bunny rabbit" as a wild animal because this term seems fittingly to describe only predators like lions, tigers and wolves. We now know, for example, that wolves are not the frenzied killers that are sometimes portrayed in the movies. We have learned that wolves establish the pack hierarchy with very little violence.

In sum, "wild animal" does not fit the animals previously understood by this expression. Incidentally Roget's Original Thesaurus corroborates our view: it includes the words "brute," "beast" and "wild beast" under the category of "violent creatures."

You write as if the words we use have little or no bearing on the subject being discussed. If, for example, one is talking about women in general and refers to them as bimbos, I think it is clear that such a person has at the very least a distorted or biased view. Such a view of women would certainly color that person's behavior toward women.

Examples revealing the power of words are numerous. Think of the slogan "Black is beautiful." Reflect on the various names hurled at African-Americans and the angry and hurt response such names engender. Consider the "fighting bulls" in Spain. These are the bulls that are stabbed and killed in the bullring. For many people, this expression justifies bull fighting: if bulls are "fighting bulls," then what is wrong with fighting them since this is their very nature, this is what they are. If you have ever seen a bull fight, you would see that the bulls rarely come into the ring "fighting" and that they do so only after being repeatedly stabbed. If you could see--as I have--the "fighting bulls" in a field before a bullfight, you would see a bunch of placid male cows. Once again, the terms do not fit. They are only used by those who want to continue a cruel practice that some people enjoy.

I believe that your use of the word "master' in dog training is insensitive. Of course there is an inequality between a dog and the person who is trying to train him, but if the trainer is the "master," what word characterizes the dog but "slave." In fact, I am sure you know better than I that dogs--and other creatures--are often mistreated and abused by their "masters" who are trying to train them precisely because they think of themselves as masters and use training methods that are cruel. In some situations the animal is viewed not as a sensitive creature, but as a robot-like object that must obey our human whims. Such "masters" may consider themselves superior in every way to the dog they are training. War dogs, of course, show us that in some cases like sniffing out bombs, the dogs are our masters.

In sum, Andrew Linzey and I reconfirm our position: we need to reconceptualize our ideas about animals and we need new or different words to do so."

W rzece Biała Tarnowska doszło do śnięcia nawet kilku ton ryb - informuje organizacja ekologiczna WWF Polska. Trwa wyjaśnianie przyczyn zatrucia.

- Dominującymi gatunkami śniętych ryb były świnka, kleń, jaź i brzana - mówi Mateusz Przebięda z WWF Polska. - Na dnie oraz głazach w korycie rzeki spoczywały okazy 30-50-cm, natomiast mniejsze ryby spłynęły z nurtem rzeki. Tylko z jednego punktu obserwacyjnego można było zobaczyć śnięte ryby o masie mniej więcej pół tony. Należy jednak zaznaczyć, iż kolejne sztuki spływały na bieżąco rzeką. Można więc przypuszczać, iż w wyniku skażenia wody jest kilka ton śniętych ryb - ocenia.

Pracownicy tarnowskiego okręgu Polskiego Związku Wędkarskiego szacują straty na kilkaset tysięcy złotych.