Paper for DISCOURSE AND SOCIETY
'A pig is a person' or 'You can love a fox and hunt it': innovation and tradition in the discursive representation of animals.
Guy Cook
Version 3, 16 February 2015
Professor Guy Cook
Dept of Education and Professional Studies
King's College London
Waterloo Road
London SE1 9NH, UK
email:
running head: 'A pig is a person' and/or discursive representation of animals
words: 9007(excluding cover page, abstract, biographical notes, acknowledgements)
Abstract
In contemporary urban society animals have been erased in many people's lives (Stibbe 2012, 2014). They are generally encountered only as meat, pets, pests, or vicariously in fiction and documentaries; yet the relation of humans to other animals is a matter of pressing environmental, social, economic, and philosophical concern, and across the social and natural sciences there is increased interest in human-animal interaction. This situation gives rise to many different and often irreconcilable ways of talking about animals, and current debates about human-animal interaction are frequently polarised and based on incompatible standpoints, such as those of animal rights and human exceptionalism. This article analyses two interviews which exemplify such radically opposed views: one with a spokesperson for the Vegan Society, and one with a spokesperson for the Countryside Alliance, a pro-hunting pressure group. Both are placed against the background of other interviews collected as part of an ongoing larger research project on the discursive representation of animals. Each is shown to use and promote a way of speaking about animals which is at odds with mainstream establishment discourse.It is suggested that they represent two mirror-image reactions to the erasure of animals in contemporary urban life which, despite their differences, reflect a more intimate encounter with actual animals. One actively seeks to preserve and promote a traditional discourse, the other to innovate a new non-speciesist discourse. They thus reflect, in their uses of language,contrasting possible reactions to a major social and environmental change.
Keywords
Human Animal Studies, animal studies, discourse analysis, ecolinguistics, ecocriticism, animal rights, speciesism, human exceptionalism, animal welfare, veganism, hunting, animal erasure, interviews
Bionote
Guy Cook is Professor of Language in Education at King's College London. He has published on discourse analysis, applied linguistics, literary stylistics, language teaching, and public debates about food policy. He is currently principal investigator on a three-year project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled 'People', 'Products', 'Pets' and 'Pests': the discursive representation of Animals.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Alison Sealey, Clyde Ancarno and Ben Rampton for comments and advice.
Funding Acknowledgement
This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust, grant number RPG-2013-063
'A pig is a person' or 'You can love a fox and hunt it': innovation and tradition in the discursive representation of animals.
Introduction
Relations with other animals have always been at the centre of human life, thought and language. Domestication of animals drove cultural and economic change (Shipman 2011) and influenced both conceptual and ethical frameworks (DeMello 2012:84-98). In the often quoted words of Lévi-Strauss (1962:89) animals are "good to think with"1. They are also "good to talk with", and animal symbolism and expressions permeate languages, including English. For this reason, the study of how animals are described and discussed in contemporary English can provide insights into both the language itself and the social and ideological stances towards animals which it reflects.
This centrality of animals in human life has, however, until recently been marginalised by the 'humanities' and 'human sciences', both of which have—as their names suggest—traditionally dealt exclusively with humans, leaving the study of other animals to the 'natural sciences'. As Urry (2011:7) remarks, “The social sciences mostly operate on the clear separation between nature and society”. This macro-disciplinary barrier has made it difficult for scholars on either side of the divide to study the interaction of humans and animals and how it affects and is reflected in ideas, culture and language. This conceptual obstacle is now being extensively addressed by scholars institutionally located in a wide range of 'human' disciplines, including anthropology (e.g. Hurn 2012), history (e.g. Bourke 2011), history of science (e.g. Daston and Mitman 2005), palaeo-archeology (e.g. Shipman 2011, Mithen 1999), philosophy (e.g. Agamben 2004, Cavell et al. 2008, Derrida 2008, Dupré 2002, 2012), post-humanities (e.g. Fuller 201, Harraway 2008) and sociology (e.g. Carter and Charles 2011). These disciplinary assignations do not however reflect the interdisciplinary commitment of all these studies, and how they necessarily transcend traditional boundaries in order to study human animal interaction. An interdisciplinary approach is also at the heart of the recent and rapidly growing new areas of enquiry Human Animal Studies (DeMello 2012, Taylor 2013) and Animal Studies (Gross and Vallely 2012).
Understanding of linguistic and discursive representation of animals can contribute to all of these investigations. It is as yet, however, an under-researched area, although the emerging sub-discipline of ecolinguistics (Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001, Stibbe 2015) frequently addresses issues to do with animals, and there have been a number of notable books (e.g. Dunayer 2001, Stibbe 2012) and articles and chapters (Gilquin and Jacobs 2006, Goatly 2006, Sealey and Charles 2013, Sealey and Oakley 2013, 2014, Stibbe 2014, Tannen 2004) on the linguistic analysis of discourse about animals.
The purpose of this article is to add to understanding of the role of language in the conceptualisation of animals by exploring an aspect of how current ideas about human animal interaction relate to ways of speaking in English. To illustrate my argument I use examples from interview data collected from individuals professionally involved in communications about animals, often expressing radically opposed views, which was collected for an ongoing project investigating the discursive representation of animals.
Contemporary disputes
As the world population grows and the environment degrades, many people's experiences of other animals have changed dramatically (Diski 2012). The majority of the world's population now live in urban environments (United Nations 2011) and their encounters with animals are consequently diminished. In response to increased demand for meat, increasingly intensive and industrialised animal livestock farming has led to a situation where, in the 'developed' world, the raising, slaughtering and butchering of animals is increasingly invisible to their consumers, who encounter meat only as a packaged 'product'. The use of animals for medical research in laboratory experiments is likewise effectively invisible to most people, although its findings inform their medical treatment. Although many people have 'pets' or 'companion animals' (one of the contested linguistic choices to which I shall return below), neutering and readily available veterinary treatment have made relationships with these animals much more sanitised than in the past, when their reproduction, illnesses and death were part of an altogether more obtrusive experience. Animals are then, for most people, and in many ways, kept at a distance. When certain unwanted or 'out-of-place' animals do nevertheless intrude into contemporary life, pest-control services can be employed to remove them. Meanwhile, however, while the presence of 'real' animals recedes, they continue to feature as strongly as ever in virtual form, as children's toys and in stories and cartoons, as symbols and in images, and—with varying degrees of anthropomorphism—in the popular genre of the wildlife documentary (Bousé 2000, Sealey and Oakley 2013).
For many people then, at least in the 'developed' world, animals are now generally directly encountered only as 'products' (such as meat), 'pets', occasionally as 'pests', or vicariously in stories. Animals have been, as Stibbe (2012, 2014) vividly puts it, 'erased'. Yet this 'distancing' (Novak 2012) and 'sequestration of experience' (Giddens 1991) sits uneasily with a growing need to understand and maintain the co-existence of humans and other animals in a time of rapid environmental and economic change. Diminishing wilderness and environmental degradation underline human responsibility for decreasing biodiversity; intensive animal husbandry highlights pressing welfare and practical problems about food production and consumption; medical advances raise ethical issues about the use of animals for human advantage. Discourse analysis of talk about animals can serve to illuminate all of these concerns, and hopefully lead to greater engagement with them.
Awareness of such problems has led to a variety of responses in rich urbanised countries such as the UK, where the research drawn upon below was conducted. These include increased concern about the environment and the protection of wild species, opposition to industrial meat and dairy farming. Widespread concern with animal welfare is manifest in shoppers' demands for information about the sources of animal products, opposition to hunting and animal experimentation, and support for animal welfare charities such as the RSPCA2. An estimated 5% of the UK population are vegetarian3and an estimated .3% are vegan4(although the motives for choosing these diets are not only concern for animal rights or welfare). An increased abstinence from meat in the first world is meanwhile accompanied by growing meat consumption in newly prosperous sections of populations in other countries such as India and China.
Such developments have brought heightened energy and prominence to a number of long-standing debates between people with irreconcilable points of view, such as proponents and opponents of vivisection, hunting, meat eating, and industrial farming. Such debates and the campaigns associated with them have a long history—in the UK the RSPCA was founded in 1824, the Vegetarian Society in 1847, the Anti-Vivisection Society in 1875, the League Against Cruel Sports in 1924, the Vegan Society in 1944, and the Soil Association (the leading campaigner for organic farming) in 1946. Nevertheless, a number of new developments have informed such debates in recent years. Prominent among these is the idea of Animal Rights, first proposed by Regan (1983), building upon Singer (1975), and equivalences suggested by other later writers between 'speciesism' 5—discrimination against animals in favour of humans—and various forms of intra-human discrimination such as sexism and racism (Berman 1994, Bourke 2011, Harraway 2008, Hurn 2012). This equivalence (to which I shall return below) leads to similarities between campaigns for non-sexist and non-racist language and that for non-speciesist language.
There are thus currently a number of highly polarised debates around human interaction with animals. In what follows, I explore two contrary points of view, one advocating animals rights, the other defending hunting for sport, and relate these to an argument, informed by the interdisciplinary literature referred to above, about the link between linguistic innovation and larger social changes. To do this, I need to refer to two diametrically opposed underlying key philosophical beliefs: human exceptionalism and animal rights. So I shall first explain at greater length the nature of the two philosophical positions and their relation to animal welfare. Interviewees do orient their comments towards exceptionalist and animal rightist standpoints, so these are positions emerging from the data, not merely imposed upon it, although the actual term "exceptionalism" is not widely known or used by them. Professions of concern for "welfare" are a constant theme in all interviews with campaigners.
Human Exceptionalism, Animal Rights, and Animal Welfare
Human exceptionalism is the belief that humans are categorically and qualitatively different from all other animals, and consequently have more moral worth and more rights. It has a long history in Western thought with roots in both classical philosophy (Aristotle 2007) and Judaeo-Christian theology (Genesis 1:27-29) which claims divine authority for human dominion over all other species6.Few if any human exceptionalists now hold the Cartesian view that animals are mere machines (Descartes 2007), as recent scientific evidence has shown conclusively that some animals have levels of intelligence, consciousness, theory of mind, emotion, culture, technology and symbolic capacity which are much higher than was previously known. Human exceptionalists do nevertheless maintain a belief in a qualitative difference between humans and all other animals and/or the uniqueness of certain capacities, such as for example language (Chomsky 1965, Pinker 1994), and this qualitative difference is used as the basis for a belief in greater human moral worth.
Human exceptionalism is the default view in the contemporary UK, if not the world, reflected in the extent of practices incompatible with a belief in animal rights, such as meat eating, intensive farming, animal ownership, pest control, the academic distinction between 'natural' and 'human sciences' (discussed above), and the legal status of human but not animal rights. This prevalence is reflected in 'ordinary language'. While humans are classified scientifically as belonging to the Kingdom Animalia, and are thus animals in biological terms, the everyday use of the term 'animal' does not include humans. (The question 'Do you have any animals living with you?' would not normally elicit mention of family members, other than humorously.) Objection to this everyday lexical distinction has driven a number of innovative coinages by opponents of exceptionalism such as the Vegan Society interviewee discussed below. They talk of 'non-human animals' or 'other animals' instead of simply 'animals', 'companion animals' instead of 'pets', 'guardians' instead of 'owners', 'things taken from animals' instead of 'animal products', and they avoid grammatical features of everyday language which arguably reflect the exceptionalist view, such as the use of possessives ('my cows') to indicate ownership, and pronominal reference to an animal as 'it' instead of 'he' or 'she', and 'what' or 'which' instead of 'who' (Gilquin and Jacobs 2006, Gupta 2006, Sealey and Oakley 2013).
Animal rights is the contrary belief that there is no categorical or essential difference between humans and other animals, and that animals, including humans, have equal worth and rights. Adherents differ over whether this extends to all animals, as it does in Jainism, or only to some animals, but the general tendency is for believers in animal rights to be mostly if not exclusively concerned with animals known to be sentient (DeGrazia 2002).
Human exceptionalism and animal rights are complementary antonyms: non-adherence to one implies adherence to the other. Logically, the only exceptions to this mutual exclusivity are beliefs, such as extreme forms of racism and sexism (Bourke 2011), which regard only some human beings as superior to other animals.
A further, apparently intermediate, position is a commitment to animal welfare. This may be defined as the view that humans have a moral responsibility to reduce suffering and seek the best possible quality of life for individual animals. Yet this is not in fact an intermediate position, as a commitment to animal welfare is neutral with regard to belief in human exceptionalism or animal rights. While belief in animal rights necessarily entails a belief in animal welfare, the converse is not necessarily the case, and many advocates of animal welfare are also believers in human exceptionalism. There are also areas where the beliefs of animal rights advocates about animal welfare differ markedly from mainstream views. Thus while many advocates of animal welfare are concerned with improving conditions for farm and other domestic animals, some animal rights advocates regard domestication of any kind as an infringement of animal rights and liberty. From this perspective it is sometimes claimed that domestication, even if the end purpose is slaughter for meat, can bring benefits to individual animals, such as healthcare, protection from predators, and uninterrupted food supplies (Fearnley-Whittingstall 2004). Some theorists have advanced the notion of domestication as a kind of human-animal contract which has arisen through evolution (Budiansky 1999, Shipman 2011).
Source of the data
The discussion that follows uses some of the data collected during the first year of the three-year research project called 'People', 'Products', 'Pests' and 'Pets': the discursive representation of animals7, running jointly at King's College, London and Lancaster University, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project aims to deepen theoretical understanding of the relation between linguistic choices made in English and representations of animals, to examine whether established ways of talking and writing about animals are attuned to describing contemporary human-animal interaction, and to provide evidence about how current ways of speaking and writing may contribute to, or detract from, positive action in sustaining that co-existence, thus hoping to make a contribution to the cause of environmental and species conservation. To achieve these ends, the project as a whole is collecting, analysing and correlating three types of data.
- A digital corpus of texts and transcripts for automatic analysis with corpus-linguistic software to reveal patterns in comparative frequencies of individual words and word sequences.
- Transcripts of interviews with people whose work involves communications about animals.
- Transcripts of focus groups defined either by age (e.g. over 60s, under 25s), by behaviour (e.g. vegetarians), by work (e.g. farmers), by activity (e.g. hunters).
The principle guiding this research is that language use cannot be analysed or accounted for separately from the social context of its production and reception, the intentions of the sender, and the knowledge and attitudes of the receiver (van Dijk 2010, 2014). To this end, the interviews provide a needed insight into how those communicating information and policy account for their own linguistic and communication strategies (Gee 1999: 53-70, Wodak et al. 1999); the focus groups provide a window into how different groups react to language choices (Myers 2004, Myers and McNaghten 1999)—although it needs to be borne in mind that neither interviews nor focus groups provide a direct insight into writing or reading processes, but only into the explicitly stated beliefs of the participants about these processes. The language chosen for scrutiny in the interviews and focus groups is informed by the analysis of an extensive corpus which allows us to establish the frequency and typicality of linguistic features through the systematic comparison of many texts, and thus avoid the pitfall of relying too heavily on arbitrarily selected single texts and the analyst’s own intuitions (Stubbs 1996: 14-20).