Dropping “Nonhuman”
Having been writing on a number of different subjects quite distinct from veganism and animal liberation, I had a chance to reflect on some of my older posts. I looked critically both at their content and form (language). This note is devoted to one instance of language use, specifically the concept/term “nonhuman”.
The introduction of “Nonhuman animals/nonhumans” into the animal rights discourse was part of a linguistic revision undertaken to rid it of speciesist terms and habits. Specifically, “nonhuman” is meant trying to erase the false divide between the animal and the human. It suggestes that humans are animals as well, and that there should be no basic ethical gap between humans and individuals of other animal species, as long as they are sentient beings, i.e. capable of thought, feeling, or any other kind of subjective experience. I started using the term consistently in my writing to denote that I was talking about animals other than humans, e.g. “Nonhuman animals are kept as property and as such they have no rights”. When talking about all animals in general (humans included), I would use “animals”, e.g. “Animals care whether they live or not”. I do think that building a bridge between the dominating and the dominated species is a crucial step towards a realization in human consciousness that the suffering we visit upon other animals is built-upon speciesist ideology. That ideology serves us well to distance ourselves from our victims, so it is important that it be disrupted. But I’ve been growing unseasy with “nonhuman” to the point where I decided to stop using it at all.
Even Joan Dunayer (2001:13), who has used it frequently, acknowledged its limitations: “Even the word nonhuman divides all animals into two, seemingly opposed categories: humans and everyone else. With equal validity we could categorize all animals as giant squids and non-giant-squids”. In the end, she defends the term by saying that it “avoids labeling other animals inferior and emphasizes that humans too are animals”. But the problem is deeper than she admits.
David Nibert said in an interview (with Mercy for Animals) that”even the use of the term ‘non-human’ animal — like one of its counterparts in the area of ethnic stratification, ‘non-white’ — implicitly represents human animals as the norm and other types of animals as outside the norm, thus reinforcing their quality of ‘otherness.’” So the problem with “nonhuman” is that the “human” remains at the very center of the picture that was supposed to depict other animals. Each and every time one wishes to speak of pigs and cows collectivelyby using the term “nonhumans”, one still bring humans right up there. Looking at “nonhumans” written on a page, one sees “non-humans“. What is more, one then defines other animals exactly by what they are not, in an exclusionary way, omitting their own characteristics completely.
Agreeing with J. Dunayer that “for now we must speak in terms of humans and all other animals because all other animals lack legal rights”, I opt for that exact term, “other animals”. One can’t use it as freely as “nonhuman animals” as many different contexts, but, as D. Nibert has shown in his “Animal Rights/Human Rights”, it is possible to construct meaningful and concise sentences with the term. I would also suggest not erasing particular animals from the picture – whenever appropriate, it is good to mention sheep, trouts, pigs, chickens etc., even if only as examples of more general categories one has in mind.
“Other animals” is also more easily translatable into Polish and possibly many other languages which lack the flexibility of English in manipulating prefixes. Attempts to translate “nonhuman animals” end up in unnatural and unnecessarilt “alien-sounding” constructions. “Pozaludzie”, the Polish equivalent of “nonhumans” sounds strange and artificial, and probably will not stick.
On an end note, I think there overt preoccupation with cleaning up linguistic speciesism may be counterproductive. Speciesist ideology is not a self-propagating phenomenon, that is to say, it has sources other than itself. D. Nibert convincingly argues for the primacy of material/economic factors in animal exploitation, while avoiding the reductionism of some deterministic interpretations of Marxism. There are, he says, structural economic and social factors which constantly inform and reinforce prejudice in language, and use its speciesist potential to reinforce themselves. Until they are acknowledged and we stop focusing on veganism as a purely individual decision and choice, the structure of speciesism will remain intact. Its roots are systemic and institutional, and have so far gone unnoticed by ethicists such as Peter Singer and Gary Francione. But one does have to describe those powerful social forces in a language optimally devoid of the misleading ideological constructions which they actively promote.
