Fw: speciesism and language

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EXCEPTIONAL ARTICLE ON speciesism and language.

 

The following article appears in 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.

 

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), the first book on

speciesism and language.