ANIMALS AND SOCIETY:
AN INTRODUCTION TO
HUMAN-ANIMAL STUDIES
Chapter 14: Animals in Human
Thought
C o py r i g h t M a r g o D e M e l l o a n d C o l um b i a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 2 01 2
ANIMALS IN LANGUAGE
 Words about animals shape our understanding of animals.
 Once an animal has been classified as a pet, it would, in our
culture, be dif ficult to turn that animal into meat. Similarly, we
don’t think twice about consuming animals that have already
been classified as livestock.
 Language then both reflects cultural values and practices, and
shapes those very same values and practices.
 So if language shapes how we see the world and teaches us
cultural values and norms, what does it say about how we see
the world when we use words like dog, cow, or fox to describe
people, or when we call someone bitchy, catty, or chicken?
ANIMALS IN LANGUAGE
 What are the implications of calling people by animal names,
especially when those names are used as pejoratives?
 Animal pejoratives reinforce attitudes towards marginalized humans
by comparing them with another marginalized group: animals.
Negative animal imager y of ten used to disparage humans, especially
women and minorities. Words like bitch, cow and sow almost
exclusively refer to women and girls only, and imply a number of
negative traits, like stupidity, passivity, moodiness and obesity.
 Calling a woman a dog or a pig not only implies that that woman is
ugly or fat, but it says something about all women as well: that they
are to be judged primarily on the basis of their physical appearance,
and that if they fail in achieving the cultural standard of beauty, then
they deser ve to be called an animal.
 Words like vermin, cockroaches and rats were used to refer to Jews in
Nazi Germany, and African American men were called animals during
and af ter slaver y. Calling people animals like this makes them
“other” and allows us to more easily kill them
ANIMALS IN LANGUAGE
 How does using animal terms to refer to people, or animal
idioms, impact the real-world treatment of animals?
 Language is never neutral—it shapes behavior.
 Animal pejoratives denigrate certain categories of people —
women and minorities, primarily —but they denigrate animals
as well.
ANIMALS IN LANGUAGE
 Creating pejoratives from the names of animals humans
establish distance between themselves and the animals they
regularly abuse. The fact that dog, cow, pig, sow, bitch, and
chick are all thought of negative terms means that those
animals are thought of negatively. A woman who is called a
cow is thought to be fat and dull; likewise, the animal, the
cow, is thought of as dull. A dull animal is an animal who,
ultimately, deserves to die.
 In addition, phrases like “skin a dead cat” contribute to a
permissive social attitude towards the abuse of animals.
Negative animal idioms normalize or trivialize violence
towards animals. When sayings like “flog a dead horse” are
used and become a normal part of our vocabulary, we can no
longer “see” the implications of human violence against
animals.
ANIMAL IDIOMS
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Bleeding like a stuck pig
Cook someone's goose
Dead as a dodo
Got bigger fish to fry
Killing two birds with one stone
Like a chicken with its head cut off
Like a lamb to the slaughter
Not enough room to swing a cat
Shooting fish in a barrel
So hungry I could eat a horse
Take the bull by the horns
There's no sense beating a dead horse
To let the cat out of the bag
To shoot the bull
ANIMALS IN LANGUAGE
 In addition, the language used in animal industries serves to
depersonalize and de -animalize animals: breeding stock,
machine, research tool. Terms like meat serve as absent
referents, mystifying the animals who were transformed into
meat.
 Most negative animal idioms about companion animals are
about cats. This reflects a long history of cats being
mistrusted and mistreated; that’s where the phrases come
from: cats really were at one time stuf fed in bags and
drowned, skinned, and swung around.
 The treatment of animals is shaped by another linguistic
practice as well. It is linguistic convention in popular media
to refer to animals as “it” unless the writer or speaker knows
that the animal in question is male or female.
ANIMALS AS SYMBOLS
 Throughout history, and all around the world, various cultures
have used animals as symbols. The meaning of symbols
depends on the cultural context in which they appear, and
shape how we think about things.
 Animals are used to symbolize a whole host of characteristics
that we see in ourselves, or want to project onto others, but
that may be dangerous or foreign to us. Thus animals can be
lustful, deceitful, murderous or promiscuous.
 They can also symbolize more positive qualities like love,
altruism, and sacrifice. we both bestialize people and
humanize animals. And while we can use animals to highlight a
person’s good qualities (brave like a lion), we more commonly
use animals negatively (cunning like a fox), and especially to
denigrate racial minorities.
 In the Middle Ages, books called bestiaries were extremely
popular, which were filled with images of animals, a bit about
their natural history, and what the animals symbolized,
accompanied by a moral lesson
ANIMALS AS SYMBOLS
 Why are animals so commonly used as symbols?
 Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his work on totemism,
said that animals are chosen as totems not because they are
good to eat, but because they are “good to think (with).”
 In other words, animals have great metaphorical potential,
and, for Lévi-Strauss, they are especially useful for
representing social classifications like clans and other aspects
of kinship systems. Ancient and traditional cultures both saw
animals as closely related to humans, so it made sense that
they would be incorporated into human symbolic orders, and
used to represent human behaviors, desires, and dreams.
ANIMALS AS SYMBOLS
 But why do we choose some animals to symbolize specific
things? On the one hand, symbols are arbitrary. But in the
case of animals, there is generally some kernel of truth
at the root of the animal’s symbolic association —some
aspect of its biology or behavior that make humans
interpret it in a particular way.
 Cats, for instance, can be symbolic of bad luck, of evil, or
of witchcraft in Western cultures. Why the cat was
chosen, and not, for example, the dog, tells us something
about both cats (who famously see in the dark) and about
the people in the cultures that use cats in this way.
ANIMALS AS SYMBOLS
 Often what we see in an individual animal is
obvious: ants often symbolize teamwork and
discipline, the deer grace and sensitivity, the
snake, because of its ability to shed its skin,
regeneration, and the rabbit quickness.
 Rabbits are linked to sexuality --and particular
female sexuality and fertility --in the rituals,
myths and symbols of people around the world.
The rabbit is also linked to the moon, which itself
is linked to fertility and childbearing. Rabbits are
also used to signify rebirth, explaining the
rabbit's role in the symbols of Easter.
ANIMALS IN ARTWORK
 Animals’ symbolic attributes also make them fine
subjects for artist representation. They have been used
by artists as a decorative motif, to represent the real
place of animals in society, and also symbolically —to
represent the same qualities that they represent
elsewhere in the culture.
 Artwork involving animals dates back to the earliest
forms of artwork from the Paleolithic era —the European
cave paintings from 30,000 years ago featured animals
more than they did humans, and included large animals
which played a major role in human lives —as predators
and prey.
 Later, with the rise of agriculture in the Neolithic, and
the domestication of animals, domesticated animals
began to displace wild animals as subjects in artwork.
ANIMALS IN ARTWORK
 In contemporary art, animals, if they appear, are
used in very different ways than was found in the
past. In particular, it is rare to see animals depicted
as symbols anymore, or sentimentally.
 Some contemporary artists use dead animals, or
even kill animals, for their art. These artists are
trying to provoke reactions from the public.
 Other artists use live animals in their artwork.
 Still other artists working today use their work to
directly challenge cultural views about animals, and
take a strong position in favor of animal rights.
MIRRORS FOR HUMAN IDENTITIES
 What animals ultimately do, whether used in art,
language, or, literature is allow humans to express
ideas about human identity. What does our depiction
of animals, as well as our use of animals, tell us
about ourselves?
 Ultimately, animals serve to help us understand
ourselves and our culture. And as our culture
changes in the modern era, so do interpretations and
representations of those animals.