Not It and That and What -- She and He and Who and Whom

Language matters. Words matter. And I say that not just because I personally work with words for a living. I say it because it's true.

The vast majority of us grow up thinking of nonhuman animals -- or, at the very least, certain categories of nonhuman animals -- as residing in the "it" category. That's what allows us to eat and wear them, to hunt them down, to put their suffering in circuses and zoos out of our minds, to support their torment in laboratories. An "it" doesn't think or feel; an "it" is a mindless automaton; one "it" is no different from any other "it" in the same category; an "it" can be dismissed and forgotten.

The "it" perception of animals is reinforced everywhere we aim our eyes and ears: newspaper articles, publishing style guides, television news magazines, even the language of many animal welfare advocates and Microsoft Word's squiggly grammar check.

But "it" is wrong. Anyone who has known a dog or cat, for example, knows they certainly are not unthinking, unfeeling, cookie-cutter robots. Each animal has his or her own personality and his or her own memories and experiences and preferences and, yes, absolutely yes, feelings. We know this about the dogs who share our homes, and this truth is no less true for our other fellow animals, the ones to whom most people give nary a second thought.

Switching from referring to animals as "it," "that," "which," and "what" to correctly referring to them as "she,"  "he," "who," and "whom" takes conscious effort and training. Nothing that we've been thinking, hearing, and saying for, in many cases, decades is easy to change overnight, so slipups will happen (I certainly slip up now and then), but we still have to make an effort.

Some argue that there should be exceptions -- for example, "Well, we don't always know which sex the animal is, and I call babies 'it' when I don't know whether they're boys or girls, so that's the same thing." It's not the same thing. As a society, we know that 6-month-old babies are individual beings. There aren't billions of them out there being eaten and experimented on and tormented because society views them as less-than, as somethings instead of someones. Nobody hears about the brutal killing of countless 6-month-old human babies and then says, "Well, they were just babies." You may have noticed in the last year-plus that even when I'm writing about an animal whose sex I don't know (e.g., an animal who has been mentioned in a news story), I always assign either "he" or "she" to that animal nevertheless. That has been intentional.

It is vital that animal advocates be consistent with these words because though this may seem like a minor issue, it isn't. People need to hear and see our fellow animals talked and written about in the ways that point out and respect their "who"-ness. They need to be reminded that these are individual, thinking, feeling beings we're discussing (and exploiting and killing). "It," "that," "which" -- they may seem like innocuous words, but they aren't; they put our fellow animals in the category of inanimate objects, quietly reinforcing the very perceptions of animals that need to change if we're ever to make progress. At the same time, a pronoun as simple as a "he" or a "who" really can make a difference in how we think of and picture someone in our heads during a conversation.

So in addition to being careful about our own word choices, we also can (and need to) correct others, gently. I did this with my mother recently, for example. I certainly didn't go into the issue at length as I've done here, but after she said "it" while talking about a cow, I gently, quietly interjected with just that one word -- "she." She paused before she continued with her story. She heard me. She thought about it.

The process is similar to ridding our vocabulary of offensive words that are hurtful to gay people or people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. People who are accustomed to using those pejorative words say them out of habit and without thinking, and they keep using those words unless or until others start consistently calling them out on it.

The same goes for the "it"-type words. We shouldn't scream at people for using them, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up for using them in the past or for slipping up occasionally -- we were all taught to talk about animals this way -- but we do need to become conscious of the habit and work toward changing it.

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Note: You may have noticed words in boldface throughout this post. Those are places where most people would instinctively use different words (it, that, which, something), words that relegate animals to "it" status. And I thought showing these in context might be helpful.

Photo by Flickr user Brent and MariLynn