Animal Equality - Language and Liberation

By Joan Dunayer.

A book comes across our desk occasionally that is of great importance to the Movement and this book that Joan Dunayer has written 'Animal Equality-Language and Liberation' happens to be just that.  Although the exchange rate is so weak at the moment and the book is in hard cover with no plans for it to come out in soft back, we at OINK, the Animal Liberation shop feel we must make it available to our members.  

Listen to what these people had to say about it:

Tom Regan,  'The Case for Animal Rights'
"A book of monumental importance for animal rights."

Carol.J.Adams, author of 'The Sexual Politics of Meat'.
"Intensely powerful: groundbreaking, definitive,comprehensive,compelling."

Dr Michael W.Fox, author of  'Inhumane Society'
"A major contribution to the advancement of both animal protection and our humanity."  

  What's more is that what they are saying is the truth.   Speaking of animals standard references to nonhumans confuse and mislead:  within a single sentence the same dog may be 'it' or 'she'; as expressed by the mainstream press, hunters 'harvest' animals rather than kill them.   This is the first book on animal rights and language, - 'Animal Equality: Language and Liberation ' shows us in no unspoken terms that deceptive, biased words sustain injustice toward nonhumans animals.  As Joan Dunayer demonstrates, speciesism survives through lies.  

  'Animal Equality'  provides a wealth of information and ideas. Compelling evidence of nonhuman thought and emotion debunks language that characterizes other animals as unreasoning or insensitive. If you think this is a small thing compared to the rest of the Movement as a whole then think back to when there was no Anti-Discrimination Act in place especially for women in the work-place.  Now it's taken for granted and many of us now wonder how we ever could have lived (well) without it.

  Dunayer is a master of focus on vivid descriptions of hunting, sportfishing, zoos, aquaprisons, vivisection, and the food-industry captivity and slaughter to reveal the cruelty implicit and explicit that misleading words legitimise and conceal.

What she does is brilliantly analyse 'animal' pejoratives, unmasking the speciesist attitudes and practices that underlie much racist and sexist language.  Every animal - nonhuman or human - deserves equal consideration and protection, she argues.

'Animal Equality'  illustrates the need to legislate a new defination of nonhuman animals: as persons, not property.  Vocabulary and style guidelines show us how to speak to all animals with honesty, fairness, and respect.

Bibliographic notes and a detailed index further make this book a valuable reference. There was a chapter (among many) that took my breath away on nonhuman animals 'making love'.  Yes it not just the human animal that 'makes love' although the vivisectors will tell you otherwise.   Right through-out the book you'll get a sense of just how indoctrinated by the media and the 'experts' we have become  since childhood - and we are the ones that know better now!  What about the others 'out there' that never question anything?   The darker side of indocrination perhaps? You bet.

 When they say that this book is 'devastating and exhaustively researched' they knew what they were talking about.

The books still in hard cover - arriving on our shore any day now. The cost is $45.95 and OINK is taking orders, names and phone numbers for it NOW.

Contact oink@animal-lib.org.au or phone 0407 213 516.

Peter Singer's Review of the book

Language reflects and reinforces our attitudes to others. Mark Twain displays this in Huckleberry Finn when he had Aunt Sally ask Huck about an incident in which a boiler blew out on a steamboat: "Anybody hurt?" "No'm ... killed a nigger." In Animal Equality Joan Dunayer reminds us of this passage and then goes on to give us a more recent parallel: after a plane collided with, and killed, a bird, the evenings news reported that "Nobody was injured."

That our language reflects our speciesist attitude to nonhuman animals is not a new idea. In the preface to the first edition of Animal Liberation, I wrote: "The English language, like other languages, reflects the prejudices of its users" and I went on to describe the bind in which I found myself. On the one hand I needed to communicate with my audience; on the other I did not want to use language that would reinforce the very prejudices I wanted to challenge. I pointed out that even in the title of the book, I was using "animal" as if the term did not include human beings, a usage that suggests that the gap between a human being and a chimpanzee is greater than that between a chimpanzee and an oyster. I described this, with a little self-mockery, as "a regrettable lapse from the standards of revolutionary purity", but "necessary for effective communication". At the same time, to remind my readers that this was a matter of convenience only, I did from time to time write "nonhuman animals".

Dunayer takes revolutionary purity much more seriously – or perhaps it would be better to say, she takes more seriously the idea that our attitudes to animals could not survive if we used language that accurately described what we are doing to them. "Speciesism," she writes, "can't survive without lies". So she exposes, in considerable detail, the way in which our language degrades nonhuman animals and enables us to lie to ourselves about what we do to them. Separate chapters deal with particular areas of animal abuse, like hunting (for "game" of course), "sport" fishing, "zoos and "marine parks", science, and the food industry, and there is also discussion of a variety of other terms we use for nonhuman animals and ways in which we talk about them.

The discussion is very readable, and much of it is revealing, especially when Dunayer refers to guidelines and suggestions made by those in positions of authority in professions or industries that exploit animals. The Journal of Experimental Medicine, for example, adopted publication guidelines that instructed authors to avoid expressions such as "acute" or "intense" where they imply suffering. Baby rhesus monkeys taken from their mothers don't experience fear or grief, they show "cognitive and affective responses to separation. In America the National Cattlemen's Association (which seems to be sexist as well as speciesist) has told its members to say that animals are "processed" or "harvested" rather than "slaughtered" and slaughterhouses are now "processing plants" or "packing plants". The American Farm Bureau has got into the game as well, recommending that "whips" and "sticks" used to drive animals to slaughter – sorry, to harvest – should be described as "guides".

Many of these changes have happened in direct response to criticism from advocates for animals. When I wrote Animal Liberation, the producers of eggs and chicken flesh all used the word "debeaking" to describe the process of cutting off the birds' beaks with a hot blade, so that they would peck each other to death. Even that term was a euphemism, but after the animal movement started talking about debeaking in its accounts of what these industries did to birds, the producers thought again: now they describe the identical procedure as "beak trimming", as if it were just like trimming your toenails. It isn't; the beak is the bird's most sensitive means of interacting with the world, and is full of nerves, which means that cutting off part of the beak causes acute pain, and may result in chronic pain for a long time afterwards, like the "phantom limb" pain humans may continue to feel long after they have lost a limb.

Dunayer deserves our applause for exposing all this linguistic evasion. But when it comes to her proposals for linguistic reform, not every non-speciesist will want to go as far as she does. She is opposed to the use of "it" for any individual animal, preferring "he" or "she". Clearly, if we know the sex of an animal, that is right. To say of a cow that "its milk has dried up" is to think of the cow as a thing, rather than as a female animal. But is it always specieist to use "it"? Has Dunayer never said, to the mother of a baby whose sex she does not know, "Is it a girl or a boy?" I certainly have, and there may be similar circumstances in which saying the same of an animal is neutral about its status.

Similarly, Dunayer wants us to use "who" for animals, rather than "which" or "That". Again, this is generally right, but how far should we go. Dunayer wants us to speak of oysters, slugs, dust mites, jellyfish and sea-urchins as "who", because they all have some kind of nervous system, and so may be sentient. Am I just showing prejudice if I confess that I find it difficult to think of a jellyfish as a "who"? Following these suggestions strictly is likely to expose us to ridicule and make us less, not more, likely to achieve our goals of making a difference to animals. Let's wage the winnable battles first, before we go to the barricades for dust mites.

More serious issues are raised by Dunayer's recommendation that we should use "equally strong words for human and nonhman suffering or death". Reading this suggestion just a few days after the killing of several thousand people at theWorld Trade Center, I have to demur. It is not speciesist to think that this event was a greater tragedy than the killing of several million chickens, which no doubt also occurred on September 11th, as it occurs on every working day in the United States. There are reasons for thinking that the deaths of beings with family ties as close as those between the people killed at the World Trade Center and their loved ones are more tragic than the deaths of beings without those ties; and there is more that could be said about the kind of loss that death is to beings who have a high degree self-awareness, and a vivid sense of their own existence over time. Those of us in the animal movement may reasonably differ about the importance of these factors, and even over whether chickens are self-aware to some extent, but it is wrong to dismiss as "speciesist" those who want to use distinctive language to mark the premature deaths of humans as more tragic than the premature deaths of animals.

These are, however, minor disagreements. Anyone interested either in changing the status of animals, or in the study of language and its role in culture, will Animal Equality a valuable book.

Peter Singer