Language, Power and the Social Construction of Animals

Arran Stibbe

Associate Professor, Department of English
Chikushi Jogakuen University
email: arran@earth.email.ne.jp

This paper describes how language contributes to the oppression and exploitation of animals by animal product industries. Critical Discourse Analysis, a framework usually applied in countering racism and sexism, is applied to a corpus of texts taken from animal industry sources. The mass confinement and slaughter of animals in intensive farms depend on the implicit consent of the population, signaled by its willingness to buy animal products produced in this way. Ideological assumptions embedded in everyday discourse and that of the animal industries manufacture and maintain this consent. Through analysis of texts, this paper attempts to expose these assumptions and discusses implications for countering the domination and exploitation of animals.

There has recently been what Fairclough (1992, p. 2) calls a “linguistic turn” in social theory, where language is “being accorded a more central role within social phenomena.” Describing social construction, Burr (1995) writes, “language itself provides us with a way of structuring our experience of ourselves and the world” (p. 33). The role of language in power relations, particularly, has been closely examined (Chimombo & Roseberry, 1998; Van Dijk, 1997; Fairclough, 1989, 1992; Hodge & Kress, 1993; Fowler, 1991).
Most of this work on language and power focuses on the role of discourse in oppression and exploitation. For example, the journal Discourse and Society is dedicated to “power, dominance and inequality and to the role of discourse in their legitimization and reproduction in society, for instance in the domains of gender, race, ethnicity, class or world religion” (Discourse and Society, Aims and Scope). However, with rare exceptions such as Kheel’s (1995) discussion of the discourse of hunting, the role of discourse in the domination by humans of other species has been almost completely neglected. Power is talked about as if it is a relation between people only. Fairclough (1992) describes how “language contributes to the domination of some people [italics added] by others” (p. 64).

Despite the work of eco-feminists such as Adams (1990) and Kheel (1993, p. 243), whose aim is “exposing the underlying mentality of exploitation that is directed against women and nature [including animals]” sociology in general is only beginning to consider domination as it applies to animals. Berry (1997) draws parallels between the “oppression of human minorities and nonhuman animals” (p. 115), echoing Spiegel (1997), who made what she called the “dreaded comparison” between human and nonhuman slavery. Such comparisons, although rare in sociological literature, form a fundamental part of the animal rights movement and can be traced back at least to Singer (1990), who wrote “the fundamental objections to racism…apply equally to speciesism” (p. 6). This paper applies theories of language and power that have been used in the analysis of racism, particularly Critical Discourse Analysis, to the issue of the domination, oppression, and exploitation of animals by animal product industries.

Animals and Discourse

The non-linguistic participation of animals in their own social construction is one of the main reasons for excluding them from discussions of language and power. Because of the Marxist roots of Critical Discourse Analysis, analysis focuses on hegemony, where oppression of a group is carried out ideologically, rather than coercively, through the manufacture of consent (Fairclough, 1992). In animals, the power is completely coercive, carried out by a few people involved in organizations that farm and use animals. The animals do not consent to their treatment because of “false consciousness” generated through ideological assumptions contained in discourse.

However, the coercive power used to oppress animals depends completely on a consenting majority of the human population who, every time it buys animal products, explicitly or implicitly agrees to the way animals are treated. This consent can be withdrawn as has been demonstrated through boycotts of veal, battery farm eggs, cosmetics tested on animals, and, by some, all animal products. It is in the human population’s manufacturing of consent for the oppression and exploitation of the animal population that language plays a role.

Shotter (1993) uses the term “rhetorical-responsive” to describe how social constructions exist, not in the minds of individual people but within the constant interaction and exchange of information in a society. In American society, there is what Kopperud (1993) calls “a pitched battle for the hearts and minds of U. S. consumers” (p. 20) taking place between the meat industry and animal activists. This ideological struggle occurs primarily through language and the media. Jones (1997) found that “Public opposition to both the use of animals in scientific research and the killing of animals for fur increased significantly following the high level of media coverage given…” (p. 73).

How animals are socially constructed influences how they are treated by human society: “Cultural constructs determine the fate of animals” (Lawrence, 1994, p. 182). These “cultural constructs” are intimately bound up with language and discourse. Discourse “is a practice not just of representing the world but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 64). From this perspective, discourse can be considered a way of talking and writing about an area of knowledge or social practice that both reflects and creates the structuring of the area.

Van Dijk (1997) considers ideology and social cognition the link between discourse and society. Authors vary in their use of the term “ideology.” One of the classic senses of ideology is a mode of thought and practice “developed by dominant groups in order to reproduce and legitimate their domination” (van Dijk, p. 25). One of the ways this is accomplished to present domination as “God-given, natural, benign [or] inevitable” (van Dijk, p. 25). In van Dijk’s more generalized sense, this is just one kind of ideology, where ideologies are “shared self-definitions of groups that allow group members to co-ordinate their social practices in relation to other groups” (p. 26).

Rather than explicitly encouraging oppression and exploitation, ideology often manifests itself more effectively by being implicit. This is achieved by basing discourse on assumptions that are treated as if they were common sense but which are, in fact, “common sense assumptions in the service of sustaining unequal relations of power” (Fairclough, 1989, p. 84). Ideologies, embedded and disseminated through discourse, influence the individual mental representations of a society’s members, which in turn influence their actions. These mental representations are part of what van Dijk (1997) calls “social cognition” (p. 27) because members of a society share them through participation in, and exposure to, discourse. In the end, this social cognition will influence which animal products people buy, how the meat industry treats animals, and whether people actively campaign against the oppression of animals.

Data

Animals play many roles in human society, including those of companion, entertainer, food item, and commodity. Many discourses and ideologies influence how they are socially constructed. This paper emphasizes discourses that directly influence the welfare of large numbers of animals, particularly discourses related to large-scale animal product utilization.

Data were collected from a variety of different sources, all of which were publicly available and, therefore, potentially influential. The corpus consists of (a) articles published in “internal” meat industry magazines such as Poultry and Meat Marketing and Technology; (b) articles written by the meat industry for external reading, such as justifying farming methods; and (c) professional articles written by veterinarians specializing in food animals, lawyers involved in the defense of product manufacturers, and other interested parties.

In addition to the specialist discourses that appear in the corpus, mainstream discourse is also discussed. The data come from personal observation and consultation of general dictionaries, idiom dictionaries, and grammar books.

Methodology

The method used to analyze the data is a form of critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Chilton & Schäffner, 1997; van Dijk, 1993; Fairclough, 1992, 1989; Fowler, 1991; Hodge & Kress, 1993) combined with Potter’s (1996) theory of fact construction. CDA provides “an account of the role of language, language use, discourse or communicative events in the (re)production of dominance and inequality” (van Dijk, 1993, p. 282). It does this by performing detailed linguistic analysis of discourses to expose embedded ideologies.

Chilton and Schäffner (1997) provide an explicit methodology for CDA aimed at “interpretively linking linguistic details…to the strategic political functions of coercion, resistance, opposition, protest, dissimulation, legitimisation and delegitimisation” (p. 226). Their methodology echoes that of Fairclough (1992, 1989), focusing on the analysis of linguistic features such as vocabulary, grammar, textual structures, and punctuation to reveal hidden ideological assumptions on which discourse is based.

This process of revealing “common sense” assumptions can be important because, as Fairclough (1989) writes, “If one becomes aware that a particular aspect of common sense is sustaining power inequalities at one’s own expense, it ceases to be common sense, and may cease to have the capacity to sustain power inequalities” (p. 85).

The following discussion, based on detailed analysis of the data mentioned above, is aimed at answering the following question: How does language, from the level of pragmatics and semantics down to syntax and morphology, influence how animals are socially constructed and, hence, treated by human society?

Discussion

Mainstream Discourse

Singer (1990) describes the way that “The English language, like other languages, reflects the prejudices of its users” (p. vi). As an example, he gives the word, “animal,” which, in contrast to its use in scientific discourse, often excludes human beings from its semantic extension. It is usual to talk about “animals and people” or to say, “there are no animals here” when there are, in fact, people. This semantic classification can contribute to oppression by reproducing “outgroup social psychology…which distances us from, and prevents us from seeing, animal suffering” (Shapiro, 1995, p. 671).

Other linguistic mechanisms that distance us from animal suffering occur at the lexical level: “The very words we use conceal its [meat’s] origin, we eat beef, not bull…and pork, not pig…” (Singer, 1990, p. 95). We also wear leather made from hide, not skin, and eat a carcass, not a corpse. As Shapiro (1995, p. 671) points out, “We do not say ‘please pass the cooked flesh’.” Meat is meat, with very different connotations from circumlocutions with the same meaning such as “bits of the dead bodies of animals.” BBC news exploited the shock value of such circumlocutions during the “BSE crisis” when reporting that cattle were being fed “mashed up cows.”

Killing, too, is lexicalized differently for humans and animals: Animals are slaughtered, humans are murdered. Interchanging these two? You murdered my pet hamster? is comical. The refugees were slaughtered means that they were killed brutally, uncaringly, and immorally.

Animals are represented in language not only as different but also as inferior, the two conditions necessary for oppression. Conventional metaphors, which Lakoff and Johnson (1999) claim have a strong influence on our everyday thinking, are overwhelmingly negative to animals. Examples include the following: You greedy pig; ugly dog; stupid cow; bitch; you are so catty; crowing over your achievements; you chicken; stop monkeying around; you big ape (Leach, 1964; Palmatier, 1995). These examples contain nouns, adjectives, and verbs that have become polysemous through metaphorical extension in ways negative to animals. The use of animal names as insults is based on, and reproduces, an ideology in which animals are considered inferior.

Idioms that refer to animals also tend to describe negative situations or contain images of cruelty. Consider dogs: sick as a dog, dying like a dog, dog's dinner, it's a dog’s life, working like a dog, going to the dogs. And cats: cat on hot bricks, not enough room to swing a cat, a cat in hell’s chance, running like a scalded cat. And larger animals: flogging a dead horse, the straw that broke the camel’s back, talking the hind legs of a donkey. The only positive animal idioms seem to be those describing wild birds and insects: an early bird, in fine feather, feathering your nest, being as free as a bird, happy as a lark, wise as an owl; and snug as a bug in a rug, chirpy as a cricket, as fit as a flea, the bees knees. Although there are exceptions, the pattern is clear: The closer the relation of dominance of a particular species by humans, the more negative the stereotypes contained in the idioms of mainstream discourse.

The ideological positioning of animals extends into syntax as well. When animals die, they change, in a way that humans do not, from objects to substance, count nouns to mass nouns. It is possible to say some chicken, some lamb, or some chicken leg, but some human and some human leg are ungrammatical. Singer (1990) is surprised that while we disguise the origin of pig meat by calling it pork, we “find it easier to face the true nature of a leg of lamb” (p. 95). However, there is a clear grammatical difference: We cannot say a leg of person; instead, we say a person’s leg. Expressing the lamb example similarly (tonight we are going to eat a lamb’s leg) does not hide the origin in the same way.

Another context in which animals change from count nouns to mass nouns is “on a safari.” Whether the participants are carrying guns or cameras, the way of talking about animals is the same: They say we saw giraffe, elephant, and lion, instead of we saw giraffes, elephants, and lions. Using mass nouns instead of count nouns removes the individuality of the animals, with the ideological assumption that each animal is just a replaceable representative of a category. Lawrence (1994) writes, “If there are no differences among members of a group, their value and importance are greatly diminished so that it is easier to dislike them and to justify their exploitation and destruction” (p. 180).

Pronoun use can lead to the kind of us and them division similar to that found in racist discourse, with us referring to humans and them to animals. Even in the animal rights literature, the pronouns we, us, and our usually are used exclusively, that is, referring only to humans. Perhaps the strongest animal rights campaigner of all, Regan (1996), writes, “We want and prefer things…our enjoyment and suffering…make[s] a difference to the quality of our lives as lived…by us as individuals.” This seems to be an inclusive use of us, we, and our until the next sentence is read: “[T]he same is true of…animals…” (p. 37).

The common way of referring to animals as it rather than him or her objectifies them. Objects can be bought, sold, and owned, a lexical set used routinely in everyday conversation when talking about animals. This reveals the common sense assumption that animals are property. It is semantically deviant to talk about someone’s owning another human, unless the term is used metaphorically when it refers to immoral and unfair domination.

Spender (1998) shows how mainstream discourse, evolving in a male-oriented society, both reflects and reproduces bias against women. In the same way, it is not surprising to find that discourse evolving in a predominantly meat-eating culture reflects negative attitudes toward animals. The extent to which this influences people to condone exploitation is uncertain, but the discourses of groups with ideological interests in justifying the utilization of animals reinforce mainstream discourse.

The Discourses of the Animal Products Industries

One type of ideology (van Dijk, 1997) presents oppression as “God-given, natural, benign, [or] inevitable” (p. 25). In Genesis (1:28), God gives humans “dominion” over animals. The much-quoted verse often is taken literally to justify oppression of animals. The animal products industry, however, does not use the discourse of religion. Instead, it uses the discourse of science, among others, to make oppression appear natural and inevitable (Sperling, 1988)

To make the intensive farming and slaughter of animals appear natural, the discourse of evolutionary biology is often invoked to equate the behavior with that of predators in the wild. Ott (1995), a specialist in the industry-relevant field of bovine reproduction, writes of linguistic devices used to accomplish this.

After explicitly declaring, “people are animals,” Ott uses collocations such as “the human animal” and “animals other than human beings” (pp. 1023, 1024) to emphasize a semantic classification in which, unlike mainstream discourse, humans are included in the category of “animals.” Further, this directly includes humans in the semantic category of “predator." The natural relationship between predator and prey is incongruent with both an egalitarian and an animal rights viewpoint. Predator-prey relationships and a hierarchical utilization of other beings, alive and dead, are essential to nature (Ott, p. 1024).

This treats as common sense the assumption that what applies to the nonhuman animal situation of predation is the same as that which applies to the human. However, prototypical members of the category “predators” are lions and tigers, and humans are non-prototypical members (Rosch, 1975). The deliberate inclusion of non-prototypical members (humans) in general statements about prototypical ones (lions) hides important differences between the lions’ hunting their prey (which no one would argue is unethical) and intensive farming of thousands of animals in cramped conditions. Lions benefit the gene pool of their prey, and selective breeding for meat quantity damages it? differences that are conveniently hidden.

Potter (1996) shows how claims to scientific objectivity are used to “work up the facticity of a version” (pp. 112-113). Ott (1995) presents his claims as “biological principles,” “biological rules,” and “scientific knowledge” based on “biological evidence” (pp. 1023-1025), while the animal rights movement’s claims are “beliefs,” “fantasies,” “philosophical musings,” “dogma,” “the wrong view,” and “false” (pp. 1023-1029). Ott almost never hedges with terms such as “might be,” “probably,” or “can be seen as.” Instead, the modality throughout the paper presents what Potter (1996) terms, “solid, unproblematic, and quite separate from the speaker” (p. 112).

Although the discourse of evolutionary biology presents animal oppression as “natural” and “inevitable,” different discourses use different semantic classifications to make it appear “benign.” “Modern animal housing is well ventilated, warm, well-lit, clean and scientifically designed….Housing protects animals from predators, disease and bad weather.…” (Harnack, 1996, p. 130). Here, the semantic extension of predators does not include human predators such as the farmer, from whom the housing offers no protection.

This “ontological gerrymandering” (Potter, 1996, p. 186) makes wild animals seem the enemy of domestic animals, with humans their protectors. As Garner (1998) points out, “Agribusiness interests often disguise the grim realities of factory farming and proclaim their concern for animal welfare” (p. 463). This can be seen in the language used in the quotation above. The euphemism “housing” is used in place of cage, and the five positive qualities of the “housing” follow one after other in a list? a grammatical pattern used by real estate agents to describe a desirable residence.

Like many of the properties described by real estate agents, alternative, less euphemistic ways can describe the same accommodation. For example, compare “Modern animal housing is…well-lit” with “Crammed into tiny cages with artificial lighting…” (Harnack, 1996, p. 136). Compare “well ventilated, warm, …clean” (Harnack, p. 136) with “[T]he heat mixed with the ammonia and dust in the houses causes incredible health problems” (Bowers, 1997a). A quotation in Knowlton and Majeskie (1995) shows that even punctuation is used for ideological ends: “ …people concerned about animal welfare…may have seen a sensational news story about the abuse of animals or about ‘factory farms’” (p. 449). Quotation marks are used to distance intensive farming from the image of a factory.

Although the external discourse of animal industries presents the treatment of animals as benign, internal discourse has a different ideological objective. Here the aim seems to be to encourage workers to neglect suffering and focus on profit. Fiddes (1991, p. 200) describes how the industry “regards care for their animal raw materials as little more than a commercial oncost." An indication of this can be found in the archives of the industry magazines Poultry and Meat Marketing and Technology (www.mtgplace.com). Within these archives, items in the lexical set “pain, suffering, hurt(ing)”? with reference to animals? are mentioned in 3, 2, and zero articles, respectively. On the other hand, items in the lexical set “money, financial, profit” are mentioned in 224, 101, and 90 articles, respectively.

Hidden assumptions that make the suffering of animals appear unimportant can be found in the linguistic devices used in the discourse of the meat industries. One of these devices is metonymy, “one of the basic characteristics of cognition” (Lakoff, 1987, p. 77). Examples (emphases added) include the following quotations:

1. Catching broilers is a backbreaking, dirty and unpleasant job (Bowers, 1997a).
2. [There is] susceptibility to ascites and flipover…in the female breeder (Shane, 1995).
3. There’s not enough power to stun the beef…you’d end up cutting its head off while the beef was still alive (Eisnitz, 1997, p. 216).
4. Exciting times for beef practitioners (Herrick, 1995, p. 1031)

L ive birds are named and referred to by a cooking method and by their function. Cows are referred to by their dead flesh, and veterinarians specializing in bovine medicine are called “beef practitioners” instead of “cow practitioners.” These references to animals focus attention away from their individuality and contribute to what Regan (1996) calls “the system that allows us to view animals as our resources” (p. 36).’

The discourse of resources is frequently used in direct reference to live animals as well as dead ones. Examples are the word damage instead of injury in the expression “bird damage" (Bowers, 1997b), product instead of bodies in “product is 100 percent cut-up and deboned” (Bowers) and destruction and batch in, “Isolation of salmonella will result in the destruction of the flock…[or] slaughter of the batch” (Shane, 1995). The discourse of resources also includes metaphors, from dead metaphors such as “livestock” to novel metaphors such as the “animal are plants” evident in “an automatic broiler harvesting machine” (Bowers, 1997a) and “How hogs are handled before stunning and harvesting has plenty to do with the quality of meat” ("Proper treatment," 1995). Since inanimate resources cannot suffer, the discursive constriction of animals as resources contributes to an ideology that disregards suffering. When events that include suffering are described and talked about, nominalization is frequently used to hide agency (Fairclough, 1989, p. 124).

An example of this is, “Catcher fatigue, absenteeism and turnover can effect broken bones and bruises that reduce processing yields” (Bowers, 1997a). This sentence describes incidents where animals are injured. But the actual animals are not mentioned. This is accomplished through the nominalizations broken bones (X breaks Y’s bone) and bruises (X bruises Y), which allow the patient, Y, to be deleted. The agent, X, in this case the “catcher,” is also deleted, appearing only indirectly as a modifier in the noun phrase “catcher fatigue,” which forms part of the agent of the verb “effect” rather than “break.” This distances deliberate human action from animal injuries. In addition, the results of the injuries are not mentioned in terms of pain or suffering, but in terms of “yields.”

The same pattern can be seen in the following sentence: "Carcass damage from handling and bird struggle during the kill does occur in broilers" (Bowers, 1997b). There are three nominalizations here: “damage” (X damages Y), “handling” (X handles Y) and “the kill” (X kills Y). These three hide both the agent and the patient, who appears only as a modifier in the expressions “bird damage” and “bird struggle.” In addition, the resultant injuries to what are clearly live, struggling animals are expressed in terms of damage to the dead “carcass.”

Singer (1990, p. 50) points out that “detachment is made easier by the use of technical jargon that disguises the real nature of what is going on.” This can be seen in the following quotation:

Perdigo’s Marau plant processes 4.95-pound broilers at line speeds of 136 bpm, running 16 hours per day…. Perdigo previously used a stunning method more similar to US [sic] standards: 45 mA/bird (60hz) for a seven second duration with water bath. However, these stunning parameters induced pectoral muscle contraction that resulted in blood splash. (Bowers, 1997b).

Here, birds become units in the mathematically expressed parameters “136 bpm” (birds per minute) and “45 mA/bird.” And it is these “stunning parameters” that are the agent of the verb “induced”. Thus, responsibility for causing convulsions so strong that they cause bleeding is being placed on parameters rather than on the electrocution or the people instigating it.

One final linguistic device that can be used to encourage the disregard of animal suffering is extended metaphor, which, as Johnson (1983) shows, can influence reasoning patterns. The following is a famous example of a meat industry metaphor:

The breeding sow should be thought of as, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine (Coats, 1989, p. 32)

This encourages metaphorical reasoning along the lines of “machines do not have feelings;” therefore “pigs do not have feelings” and “valuable machines should be utilised as much as possible;” therefore, “pigs should be utilised as much as possible.” The results of this reasoning pattern can be seen in Coats’s (1989) description of pig farming: “The sow must produce the maximum number of live piglets in the shortest time….No regard is paid for the distress and suffering caused by these continual pregnancies” (p. 34).

Conclusion

Using the methods of critical discourse analysis, this paper analyzed a number of materials in an investigation of the connection between language, power, and the oppression of animals. The ultimate aim of such analyses is to describe and challenge relations of domination and exploitation. Fairclough (1992) describes how dominant ideologies that reproduce and maintain oppression can be resisted and how social change can come about through opposing discourses.

The animal rights movement, as it exists today, provides a discourse that opposes oppression. Animal rights authors frequently counter the classifications of mainstream discourse by using terms such as “nonhuman animal,” and “other-than-human animal.” They also use inclusive terms such as “being” in, “If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration” (Singer 1990, p. 8). This is the same “humans are animals” semantic classification used in biological discourse to argue against animal rights. However, in this case the similarities drawn are different, focusing on animals’ ability to suffer and feel pain in the same way that humans can.

As the following examples show, the animal rights movement is aware of the power of language and makes deliberate attempts to change language:

1. We chose [pets] and most likely bought them in a manner similar to the way in which human slaves were once…bought and sold…Keeping the term pets recognises this hierarchy of ownership…. (Belk, 1996)

2. The blade is electrically heated and cauterizes the blood vessels as it snips off about one fourth of the beak. The chicken industry characterizes this procedure as “beak trimming” as if it’s little more than a manicure. (Marcus, 1998, p. 103)

3. When animals are considered to be “tools,” a certain callousness toward them becomes apparent. Consider, for instance, Harlow and Suomi’s mention of their “rape rack” and the jocular tone in which they report on the “favorite tricks” of the female monkeys…(Singer, 1990, p. 50).

4. “…Road kills”: I do not believe that humans…should refer to innocent, defenceless victims…in such an insensitive, impersonal way….I believe that the term “road-kill” should be stricken from our vocabulary. (Appel, 2000, p. 8)

These examples focus on individual words. This paper has shown that not only individual words contribute to the domination and oppression of animals. Instead, language at all levels? from the morphological changes that create the metonymy “broiler” from “broil”, through punctuation, semantic classification schemes, grammatical choices, and pronoun usage to metaphor are systematically related to underlying ideologies that contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression.

The external discourses of animal product industries contain hidden ideological assumptions that make animal oppression seem “inevitable, natural and benign.” The internal discourses encourage pain and suffering to be disregarded for the sake of profit. It is not only, therefore, at the level of words that animal activists can attempt to oppose discourses of oppression but also at all linguistic levels that make up discourse.

Van Dijk (1993) describes how critical discourse analysts take the perspective of “…those who suffer most from dominance and inequality….Their problems are…serious problems that effect the wellbeing and lives of many” (p. 253). In terms of the sheer number of sentient beings suffering and the impact that intensive farming has on their lives from birth to slaughter, nonhuman animals cannot be excluded. This paper has attempted to show that language is relevant to the oppression of animals and can be an appropriate area of research for critical discourse analysis.


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