Fur has flown since the editors of the Journal of Animal Ethics presumed to introduce their new publication with a cry to stop calling pets “pets.”
The editors launched the journal—published twice yearly by the University of Illinois Press in partnership with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics—with a contentious editorial statement:
“Our existing language about animals is the language of past thought—and crucially, that past is littered with derogatory terminology: ‘brutes,’ ‘beasts,’ ‘bestial,’ ‘critters,’ ‘subhuman,’ and the like. We will not be able to think clearly unless we discipline ourselves to use more impartial nouns and adjectives in our exploration of animals and our moral relations with them.”
Best replace “pets” with “companion animals,” because “despite its prevalence, ‘pets’ is surely a derogatory term with respect to both the animals concerned and their human caregivers,” write Andrew Linzey, who directs the Oxford center and is a member of the faculty of theology at the University of Oxford, and Priscilla N. Cohn, a professor emerita of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University and the Oxford center’s associate director.
Similarly, they continue, “the word ‘owners,’ though technically correct in law, harks back to a previous age when animals were regarded as…property, machines or things to use without moral constraint.”
Dispense altogether with those derogatory terms—“pests,” “vermin”—and even such figures of speech as “sly as a fox,” “eat like a pig,” and “stubborn as a mule,” urge Linzey and Cohn. “All these say much more about humans and their perception, or rather lack of it, than they do about animals.”
The editors invited journal contributors to replace the term “wild animals” with “free-living,” “free-ranging,” or “free-roaming” because “wildness” betrayed “an obvious prejudgment…that should be avoided.”
The declared intention of the journal, whose second issue is due out in the fall, is obvious from its title. Linzey, a leading figure among ethicists who advocate drastic changes in human subjection of animals has written many books during the last two decades, including Why Animal Suffering Matters (Oxford University Press, 2009). Animals cannot consent, or effectively represent their own interests in human terms, he argues, so humans have a special duty to care for them. In 2001, the Archbishop of Canterbury awarded him a doctorate of divinity in recognition of his pioneering scholarly work on “the rights and welfare of God’s sentient creatures.”
Newspaper columnists in Britain and farther afield howled like humans when they read the journal’s call for new language and thus new thinking about animal welfare. As for reader comments, those characteristically vented disgust at “political correctness” run amok, seemingly overlooking that nothing has long been as politically correct as dealing harshly or presumptuously with animals.
Even temperate responses raised the specter of a powerful animal-ethicist lobby imposing a ban on terms like “pet.” On his Psychology Today blog, Stanley Coren, a University of British Columbia neuropsychologist who has become something of a media darling for his many popular books on dogs, wrote: “Once again we seem to have an august and prestigious group of individuals telling us that we should view animals as if they are four-footed human beings in fur coats.”
In a press statement this week on the journal’s Web site, Linzey and Cohn say their manifesto was distorted to imply that they were arguing that the word “pets” is “insulting” to the animals “which is of course absurd because animals cannot be insulted in the way in which human beings can be. Neither did we say that calling animals ‘pets’ affects their behavior, as some reported.”
But such distortion, they continued, was “itself a sign of how difficult it is to say something challenging about animals without risking hostile comment, even ridicule.”
JAE is hardly the first publication to make such arguments. Nor is it a likely agent provocateur: no gruesome images of subjected animals, in the mode of “animal liberation” organizations. In fact, no images, at all; just carefully and rather dryly argued articles with such titles as “Canada’s Commercial Seal Hunt: It’s More Than a Question of Humane Killing,” “On the Use of Animals in Emergent Embryonic Stem Cell Research for Spinal Cord Injuries,” and “Animal Ethics Based on Friendship.”
The second issue will continue in that vein, although it does begin with another editorial provocation: Linzey and Cohn question the assumption that caring about human suffering should self-evidently take priority over abating animal suffering. Among their contentions: For decades “evidence has steadily accumulated that a world in which cruelty to animals goes unchecked is bound to be a more unsafe world for human beings.”
In recent years, animal studies has taken off in Britain as in the United States and other parts of the world, loudly making claims about animal cruelty and rights issues. New books frequently appear, such as Loving Animals: Towards a New Animal Advocacy (University of Minnesota Press), due out in August, by Kathy Rudy, a Duke University ethicist whose arguments echo those that Linzey and others have been making. Linzey and Cohn are also preparing a new animal-ethics book series with Palgrave Macmillan.
For the Journal of Animal Ethics, they are planning special themed issues, whose subjects Linzey declines to reveal, yet. They believe that a moment for change is, after decades of preparation, arriving. E-mailing from Oxford, Linzey notes that in Britain since 1997, hunting with dogs, fur farming, and using great apes in research have been banned, while cosmetics testing on animals and such factory farming practices as sow stalls, veal crates, and battery hens are being phased out. A legally enforceable duty to care for domestic animals has been established. A recent vote in the House of Commons supported a ban on wild animals in circuses. “All these developments would have been inconceivable two decades before,” he writes. “Slowly but surely a new ethical sensitivity is emerging.”
Does Linzey foresee a time when humans will consider today’s treatment of animals as barbaric or ignorant, as we today deride the past presumption that slavery and child labor were reasonable?
Yes, he says: “It may take 100 years but people will be astonished to look back and realize how insensitive and cruel we once were.”