Other Animals Are People, Too

The biggest threat to animals might be the words we use

This essay explores how everyday language shapes our moral imagination — and how speciesist terms like “it” or “people and animals” quietly reinforce the belief that nonhuman beings lack personhood. By examining the linguistic roots of prejudice, it argues that changing the words we use is a necessary step toward justice for other animals.

This website edition includes light framing and internal links to help readers explore related essays on personhood, speciesism, and the ethics of language. The main text remains as originally published.

Words are powerful. Language can change reality. Literally.

Both the words we use and the words we hear influence the way we see the world and the way we act in it, the way we feel about events and the way we respond, the way we think about ourselves and the way we treat others.

Speciesist language shapes unconscious bias and reinforces the denial of animal personhood. Semantic bias in everyday speech contributes to systemic abuse of sentient beings.

In this article, I want to examine how this might constitute the biggest threat to animals on this planet today.

The Threat To Other Animals Posed By Humans

We live in a world where human beings think nothing of imprisoning and torturing to death millions of our fellow beings every single day. In the UK alone, more than a billion sentient beings are butchered every single year.

It’s considered normal.

Every one of these individuals wanted to live. Every one of them had the capacity to feel… to feel joy and sorrow, fear and excitement, pleasure and pain, just like you and I do.

Yet they are slaughtered by the thousands on production lines, by machines both mechanical and human, in terrifyingly soulless factories and processing plants, or in dark and filthy barns on dark and filthy farms by unscrupulous farmers with dark and filthy hearts.

They are hunted, trapped, caged, skinned, eaten and experimented on in numbers we can barely comprehend.

Their agonised screams ring out day and night in an endless chorus of terror, pain and betrayal.

And almost nobody bats an eye.

Why?

Because they are seen as ‘lesser’ than us. Less important. less worthy of consideration. Less worthy of life.

Despite science, as well as common sense, telling us without a shadow of a doubt that these animals are very much sentient, most humans still tend to view them, not quite as inanimate objects or automatons, but as objects nevertheless, as possessions or as property.

As ‘things’.

These sentient beings endure ethical violations that stem from cultural prejudice and linguistic framing.

The Damaging Consequences Of The Words We Use

People refer to an animal as ‘something’ rather than ‘someone’. In a global culture where the impact of someone’s pronouns is recognised as so important that people write them in their social media bios, non-human animals are still referred to as ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’.

I believe one of the most dangerous and damaging phrases in the English language is ‘people and animals’ because it is so widely used, so innocuous-sounding that it just slips off the tongue and right past your conscious mind.

This phrase exemplifies the human-animal divide and the linguistic denial of nonhuman rights.

‘People and animals’ is a sneaky yet immensely powerful phrase which has the effect of immediately separating human beings from all other species. Its implication is that humans are not even in the same biological class as animals. It unconsciously, yet instantly, sets us apart from, and above, all other animals and thus lays the foundations for all other abuse.

It implies and assumes that non-human animals are not people, that they are devoid of personhood. And an entity without personhood, by extension, is devoid of innate rights.

“But they’re NOT people,” I hear you cry. “People is a term specifically reserved for human beings.”

And to an extent I have to agree — the term ‘people’ is, indeed, reserved for human beings… by the vast majority of human beings. But is this justified?

What Is Personhood?

The concept of personhood does not have a clear and generally accepted definition. Some sources define a person merely as ‘an individual’ but that rather vague term falls far short as a satisfactory definition, as it could refer to an individual flower, an individual raindrop or even an individual paperclip… and clearly inanimate objects aren’t ‘people’.

The debate over animal personhood intersects with legal recognition and moral consideration.

Philosophers and lawyers have long argued about what constitutes a ‘person’. Amongst the attributes put forward are self-interest, autonomy, desires and motives, agency or will, the quality of being a conscious, thinking being, the capacity for rational thought or relationship with others.

Philosopher Thomas I. White argues that the criteria for a person are: is alive, is aware, feels positive and negative sensations, has emotions, has a sense of self, controls their own behaviour, recognises other persons and treats them appropriately, and has a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities.

Few would disagree that most non-human animals fit these criteria. They are clearly aware — indeed, it could be said that in many respects they are more aware than most humans. They clearly have self-interest, in that they have an interest in not suffering. They will avoid suffering and seek pleasure as surely as most humans do (again, often more so).

They possess autonomy and self-determination. They are able to make choices and learn from their mistakes. They are able to interact socially with others — both human and non-human — and they clearly display many emotions which we recognise in ourselves.

Many so-called ‘higher’ animals, including primates, pigs, cetaceans, elephants, bears, dogs and even cephalopods, have the capacity for rational thought and are able to solve quite complex problems.

Why, then, should animals not be considered as possessing personhood?

Perhaps it has more to do with convenience than logic. Or perhaps denying someone’s personhood is just a way to ‘excuse’ or ‘justify’ their oppression and abuse. I’m sure these are factors, but I also think much of our attitude towards our fellow Earthlings is shaped unconsciously by the language we use.

The Convenient Denial Of Rights

The denial of personhood is not limited to non-humans. In the not-too-distant past non-white humans in America were also denied personhood, a status Martin Luther King referred to as ‘nobodiness’. It didn’t mean, of course, that those individuals weren’t people — we can clearly see now how preposterous it was to think otherwise — but they were treated as if they weren’t people.

By the same token, the fact that we treat other animals as non-people does not mean that in reality they are not people, merely that it is convenient for us to treat them as such.

This historical oppression mirrors today’s systemic abuse of animals through speciesist norms.

With the denial of personhood comes the denial of rights.

The rights of non-human animals not to be enslaved, abused and murdered will only be recognised when their personhood is recognised, and for this it is vital that we stop using the language of oppression.

Those who have vested interests in denying animals their fundamental rights will also be determined to deny them their personhood and will insist on using language which perpetuates this — a tactic of oppressors throughout history and across societies and cultures.

Some of them will probably even object to me using words like ‘enslaved’ and ‘murdered’ because such language closes the moral gap between species and that makes many people uncomfortable.

It is, therefore, down to those of us who care about such things to consciously choose our words carefully in order to reflect the fact that other animals, and not just humans, are people, too.

We must be as considerate of the pronouns of other animals as we are towards those of our fellow humans — not because they care which words we use, but because it determines how much we care as a society.

We must not be afraid to challenge speciesist language that perpetuates the oppression of those who are most vulnerable and who cannot speak for themselves.

It’s not a matter of kindness, it’s a matter of justice.

The journey out of ingrained, systemic and cultural abuse requires a sustained conscious effort to challenge — and change — deep-rooted unconscious prejudices. It requires that we change the way we think about other animals on a fundamental level and to do that we need to change the way we speak about them.

Changing speciesist language is a vital step toward justice for animals and ethical recognition.

When we stop calling individual animals ‘it’ and start calling them ‘he’ or ‘she’, then we open the way to start seeing and respecting them not as objects, property or ‘things’ but as sentient beings in their own right, with their own lives, families, desires, fears and feelings.

We also encourage others to start seeing them in this way, however unwillingly, which can only lead to a greater degree of awareness and respect for their needs and fundamental rights.

With that awareness will come a shift in consciousness which will surely have profound benefits for billions of sentient individuals all over the globe. Because the words we use can literally change the world.

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Further Reading

The Brutal Truth About Slavery

"They're Not People"

The Forgotten Holocaust - Human Rights, Animal Rights and Oppression