Joan Dunayer recently posted a copy of a review of her book, Animal Equality, published in the journal Society and Animals. The reviewer is University of Michigan researcher Barbara Smuts who has spent much of her life researching the social behavior of nonhuman primates.
Unlike Peter Singer’s review of Dunayer’s book, Smuts largely approves of Dunayer’s view that we should talk about humans and non-humans using the same language (and even syntax). Smuts opens her review by mentioning how she was disturbed by a moment in a documentary about a man who raised an orphaned duck and eventually acquired a glider so he could fly with the duck. Smuts writes,
At first the man wondered whether the duck would recognize him, “but then,” he said, “the bird veered toward the glider and flew along beside me so close I could talk to it.” Describing this moment as “one of the most moving experiences of my life,” the man nevertheless refers to his friend as an inanimate “it,” a disturbing reminder that even people who care deeply for animals other than humans sometimes fail to speak of them as equals.
Left unstated, of course, is why caring deeply for animals means considering them as equals. Smuts seems to think that one cannot do the one without also doing the other.
Smuts is especially struck by Dunayer’s claims that language is used to deny the “individuality” of animals,
From the use of impersonal pronouns such as which rather than who, to the tendency to refer to all members of a nonhuman species as a single animal (“the chimpanzee is endangered”), to special terms such as livestock that reduce other animals to economic commodities, we ignore the unique selves of other animals in myriad ways.
A bit more bizarrely, Smuts is for some reason persuaded by Dunayer’s claim that not only do the specific words but also that syntax is unfair to animals.
Dunayer’s analyses of syntax are original and provocative. She cleverly shows how we tend to make humans the subjects of sentences, even when nonhumans are the primary actors or victims of the narrative. Similarly, linguistic conventions such as word order placing humans before nonhumans reinforce the notion that humans are important. To correct such biases, we can make an effort to structure our sentences differently (“The dog Safi and her human companion Barb went for a walk”).
Of course, doesn’t highlighting the fact that Safi is a dog also express a human desire to situate The Other in animals?
Source:
Animal Equality. Book Review, Barbara Smuts, Society and Animals, v.10, no.3.