The language of oppression and animal exploitation–time for a new and just vocabulary

Kathleen Stachowski   Other Nations

Words matter. Language matters. You know this, I know this. Go ahead, google words create culture or language creates reality and see what you get–and you’ll get plenty.

“While names, words, and language can be, and are, used to inspire us, to motivate us to humane acts, to liberate us, they can also be used to dehumanize human beings and to ‘justify’ their suppression and even their extermination,” asserts Haig Bosmajian, professor of speech communication at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“Bosmajian’s scholarly research on the language of oppression began in the 1960s when he examined the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler and Nazis, especially the language used to demonize and dehumanize the Jews and other “enemies” of the State,” according to the 1983 entry in the UW Showcase.

And just how does one dehumanize human beings? Why, by equating them with animals, of course! Animals are so…so…inferior.

Charles Patterson discusses this phenomenon in the first two chapters of Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. He lays it out neatly: humans on top, “lesser animals” below. This us over them hierarchy led to domestication, which led to exploitation and slavery of animals, which led to slavery of “lesser” humans, which was enabled by “…the use of animal images, such as “beasts,” “brutes,” “apes,” and “pigs,” as a source of dehumanization and a prelude to the exploitation and destruction of others.”

According to Patterson’s overview, as Native Americans were forcibly removed from their land and their way of life decimated, “…government agents and the press characterized them as ugly, filthy, and inhuman ‘beasts,’ ‘swine,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘wolves,’ ‘snakes,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘baboons,’ ‘gorillas,’ and ‘oran-gutans.’ ”

Animals fared no better in American propaganda during World War II, when the Japanese were likened to snakes, rats, and monkeys. “The image of a subhuman primate was key to undercutting the humanity of the enemy. The enemy was less than human, thus much easier to kill” (A. V. Navarro).

With such contempt for the “lower” species, it’s no wonder humans don’t have to work too hard at justifying animal exploitation. I mean, who cares what a renewable resource thinks and feels?!? (If, indeed, “it” actually does think and feel…) And when we harvest a renewable resource, nothing of import is lost, right? Why, it’s not much different than picking an ear of corn!

Readers of this blog have no doubt already done their own vocabulary intervention and culled the speciesist stuff.  I caught myself nearly saying something was a “hare-brained idea” the other day and then wondered why–I’ve never heard that rabbits are notably lacking in intelligence; in fact, they are wily and intelligent tricksters in many folklore and mythic traditions.

Our linguistic legacy surrounding animals is back in the news with the advent of a new peer-reviewed academic publication, The Journal of Animal Ethics, published by the University of Illinois Press and co-edited by Rev. Professor Andrew Linzey, director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (scroll down at that page for a list of his books), and Dr. Priscilla N. Cohn of Penn State.

In “Terms of Discourse,” the introductory section to the first edition (read the first page here), the authors say they “…intend to provide a regular forum for inquiry, exchange, and debate about animals and our moral obligations to them.” But first, they caution, “We will not be able to think clearly unless we discipline ourselves to use more impartial nouns and adjectives in our exploration of animals and our moral relations with them.” We must “address the power of misdescription” and expunge words of past thought: brutes, beasts, subhuman, etc.

So how do some media outlets characterize this? (Bet you can’t guess.) With headlines like, “Drunk skunks frowned upon“; with opening lines that read, “Apparently I owe my dog an apology“; and with snark and absurdist reduction: “If some fellow is reaching out to a canine with a temper, instead of shouting ‘Don’t pet the dog!’ we’d have to warn, ‘Don’t manually stroke the companion animal!’ ” (Duh, let’s at least distinguish between the verb pet and the noun pet, ‘K?) Here’s one more: “Once again we seem to have an august and prestigious group of individuals telling us that we should view animals as if they are four-footed human beings in fur coats.” (This column actually prompted a response from Dr. Cohn.)

A local political blog I read from time to time features posts from a particular blogger who speaks of politicians as weasels, payday loan purveyors as sharks (complete with Jaws-inspired imagery), and so on. I’ve actually noticed that the MCLU–the Mustelid Civil Liberties Union–has paid him an online visit in the persona of one P. Marten and kindly asked him to cease maligning the weasel family. (Gee, wonder who might have been behind that???)

So I’ll throw that one–the maligning of weasels–out there as my pet peeve (er, oh dear, now I’ve insulted peeves–meant to say companion peeve, ha ha) and ask, what’s a term of animal exploitation that you particularly dislike? And I’ll leave you with this:

“Words are political. They can foster oppression or liberation, prejudice or respect. Just as sexist language denigrates or discounts females, speciesist language denigrates or discounts nonhuman animals; it legitimises their abuse.”  ~Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation, 2001