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CHAPTER 1
Destructive Discourses
ANIMALS WITHIN A SYMBOLIC WORLD
Fairclough (1992b: 2) describes the "linguistic turn" in social theory, where toward the end of the twentieth century language began to be "accorded a more central role within social phenomena." The role of language in structuring power relations, in particular, has come under close scrutiny (van Dijk 1997, Fairclough 1989, Hodge and Kress 1993, Fowler 1991). Most of this work on language and power focuses on the role of discourse in oppression and exploitation. For example, the journal Discourse and Society is dedicated to "power, dominance and inequality, and to the role of discourse in their legitimisation and reproduction in society, for instance in the domains of gender, race, ethnicity, class or world religion" (van Dijk 2000). However, with rare exceptions, the role of discourse in the domination by humans of other species has been almost entirely neglected in the field of critical discourse analysis. Power is talked about as if it is a relation between people only; for example, Fairclough (1992b: 64) describes the way that "language contributes to the domination of some people by others" (emphasis added).
One of the main reasons that animals tend to be excluded from discussions of language and power is that they cannot use language to resist how they have been discursively constructed. Because of the neo-Marxist roots of critical discourse analysis, analysis focuses on hegemony, where oppression of a group is carried out ideologically rather than coercively, through the manufacture of consent (Fairclough 1992b: 92). In the case of animals, the power is coercive, carried out by a small number of people involved in organizations that farm and use animals. The animals do not consent to their treatment because of an uncritical acceptance of the ideology of the oppressor, and they cannot be empowered to resist the discourses that oppress them.
However, the coercive power used to oppress animals depends on the consent of the majority of the human population, who explicitly or implicitly agree to the way animals are treated every time they buy animal products. This consent can be withdrawn, as has been demonstrated through boycotts of veal, battery farm eggs, cosmetics tested on animals, and, by some, all animal products. It is in the manufacturing of consent within the human population for the oppression and exploitation of animals that language plays a role.
Shotter (1993) uses the term "rhetorical-responsive" to describe the way that social constructions exist not in the minds of individual people but within the constant interaction and exchange of information in a society. There is what Kopperud (1993: 20) calls "a pitched battle for the hearts and minds of ... consumers" taking place between the meat industry and animal rights activists, a struggle that occurs primarily through language and the media. Jones (1997: 73), for example, found that "public opposition to both the use of animals in scientific research and the killing of animals for fur increased significantly following the high level of media coverage given."
The way that animals are socially constructed influences how they are treated by human society: as Lawrence (1994: 182) puts it, "cultural constructs determine the fate of animals." These "cultural constructs" are intimately bound up with language and discourse. According to Fairclough (1992b: 64), discourse "is a practice not just of representing the world, but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning."
Van Dijk (1997) considers the link between discourse and society to be through ideology and social cognition. One of the classic senses of ideology is a mode of thought and practice "developed by dominant groups in order to reproduce and legitimate their domination" (25). The primary way that this is accomplished is to present domination as "God-given, natural, benign [or] inevitable (25). Rather than explicitly encouraging oppression and exploitation, ideology manifests itself more effectively by being implicit. This is achieved by basing discourse on assumptions that are treated as if they were common sense, but which are, in fact, "common sense assumptions in the service of sustaining unequal relations of power" (Fairclough 1989: 84).
Ideologies, embedded and disseminated through discourse, influence the individual mental representations of members of a society, which in turn influence their actions. These mental representations are part of what Van Dijk (1997: 27) calls "social cognition," since they are shared among members of a society through participation in and exposure to discourse. In the end, it is this social cognition that influences which animal products people buy, how the meat industry treats animals, and whether people actively campaign against the oppression of animals.
Animals play many roles in human society, including the roles of companion, entertainer, food item, and commodity. There are therefore numerous discourses and ideologies that influence how they are socially constructed. The emphasis in this chapter is on discourses that have a direct impact on the welfare of large numbers of animals, starting with general discourse but focusing particularly on discourses used in animal product industries.
The data that this chapter examines are based on a corpus collected from a variety of different sources, all of which were publicly available and therefore potentially influential. The corpus consists of: (a) articles from "internal" meat industry magazines such as Poultry and Meat Marketing & Technology (MM&T), (b) articles written by the meat industry for external reading, for example, justifying farming methods, and (c) professional articles written by interested parties such as veterinarians specializing in food animals or lawyers involved in the defense of product manufacturers. In addition to the specialist discourses that appear in the corpus, general discourse is also discussed. The term general discourse is used to mean terms and expressions that are used widely across a range of discourses in everyday life rather than being associated with particular groups. The data for this come from personal observation and consultation of general dictionaries, idiom dictionaries, and grammar books.
The method used to analyze the data is a form of critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Chilton and Schäffner 1997, Van Dijk 1993, Fairclough 1992b), combined with Potter's (1996) theory of fact construction. CDA provides "an account of the role of language, language use, discourse or communicative events in the (re)production of dominance and inequality" (Van Dijk 1993: 282). It does this by performing detailed linguistic analysis of discourses to expose the ideologies embedded within them. Chilton and Schäffner (1997: 226) provide an explicit methodology for CDA, aimed at "interpretively linking linguistic details ... to the strategic political functions of coercion, resistance, opposition, protest, dissimulation, legitimisation and delegitimisation." The methodology they present echoes that of Fairclough (1992b, 1989) in focusing on the analysis of linguistic features such as vocabulary, grammar, textual structures, and punctuation in order to reveal hidden ideological assumptions on which discourse is based.
This process of revealing "commonsense" assumptions can be important because, as Fairclough (1989: 85) writes, "If one becomes aware that a particular aspect of common sense is sustaining power inequalities at one's own expense, it ceases to be common sense, and may cease to have the capacity to sustain power inequalities." Clearly, in this case, the commonsense assumptions are sustaining power inequalities at the expense of animals, but given the ecologically destructive nature of intensive farming and the many ways that humans depend on other animals for our continuing survival, discourses that condone inhumane or destructive practices toward animals have an ultimate impact on humans too.
The following discussion, based on detailed analysis of the data mentioned above, is aimed at answering the following question: How does language, from the level of pragmatics and semantics down to syntax and morphology, influence the way that animals are socially constructed, and hence treated, by human society, in general discourse as well as the discourse of animal products industries? The answer to this question is necessarily brief but taken up in more detail in chapter 2
GENERAL DISCOURSE
Singer (1990/1975: vi) describes the way that "the English language, like other languages, reflects the prejudices of its users." The example he gives is of the word animal, which, in contrast to its use in scientific discourse, often excludes human beings from its semantic extension. It is quite usual to talk about "animals and people," or to say "there are no animals here" when there are, in fact, people. This semantic classification could potentially contribute to oppression by reproducing "outgroup social psychology ... which distances us from, and prevents us from seeing, animal suffering" (Shapiro 1995: 671).
Other linguistic mechanisms that distance us from animal suffering occur at the lexical level: "The very words we use conceal its [meat's] origin, we eat beef, not bull ... and pork, not pig" (Singer 1990/1975: 95). We also wear leather made from hide, not skin, and eat a carcass, not a corpse. As Shapiro (1995: 671) points out "We do not say 'please pass the cooked flesh'": meat is meat, with quite different connotations from circumlocutions with the same meaning such as "bits of the dead bodies of animals." The shock value of such circumlocutions was exploited by the BBC news during the "BSEcrisis" when reporting the fact that cattle were being fed "mashed up cows." Killing, too, is lexicalized differently for humans and animals: animals are slaughtered, humans are murdered. Interchanging these two: "You murdered my pet hamster" is comical, "The refugees were slaughtered" means they were killed brutally, uncaringly, and immorally.
Animals are not only represented in language as different, but also as inferior, the two conditions necessary for oppression. Conventional metaphors, which Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 1980) claim have a strong influence on our everyday thinking, are overwhelmingly negative to animals. For example, a person might be called a "greedy pig," "dirty dog," "stupid cow," "big ape," or "ugly bitch" or be criticized for acting "catty," "crowing" over achievements, being "chicken," or "monkeying" around (see Leach 1964; Palmatier 1995). Such terms contain nouns, adjectives, and verbs that have become polysemous through metaphorical extension in ways negative toward animals.
Idioms that refer to animals also tend to describe negative situations, or contain images of cruelty. There are various expressions about dogs: "sick as a dog," "dying like a dog," "dog's dinner," "it's a dog's life," "working like a dog," "going to the dogs." And cats: "cat on hot bricks," "not enough room to swing a cat," "a cat in hell's chance," "running like a scalded cat," "many ways to skin a cat." And larger animals: "flogging a dead horse," "the straw that broke the camel's back," "talking the hind legs off a donkey." The only positive animal idioms seem to be idioms describing wild birds and insects, for example: "an early bird," "in fine feather," "feathering your nest," "being as free as a bird," "happy as a lark," "wise as an owl," and "snug as a bug in a rug," "chirpy as a cricket," "as fit as a flea," "the bee's knees." There are exceptions to this pattern, but the pattern is clear: the closer the relation of dominance of a particular species by humans, the more negative the stereotypes contained in the idioms of general discourse.
The ideological positioning of animals extends into syntax as well. When animals die they change from being objects to substance, count nouns to mass nouns, in a way that humans do not. It is quite possible to say "some chicken," "some lamb," or "some chicken leg," but "some human" and "some human leg" are ungrammatical. Singer (1990/1975: 95) is surprised that while we disguise the origin of pig meat by calling it pork, we "find it easier to face the true nature of a leg of lamb." However, there is a clear grammatical difference here: we cannot say "a leg of person," instead we say "a person's leg." Expressing the lamb example similarly (e.g., "Tonight we are going to eat a lamb's leg") does not hide the origin in the same way.
Another place where animals change from count nouns to mass nouns is on safari. Whether the participants are carrying guns or cameras, the way of talking about animals is the same: "We saw giraffe, elephant, and lion," instead of "We saw giraffes, elephants, and lions." Using mass nouns instead of count nouns removes the individuality of the animals, with the ideological assumption that each animal is just a (replaceable) representative of a category. Lawrence (1994: 180) writes, "If there are no differences among members of a group, their value and importance are greatly diminished so that it is easier to dislike them and to justify their exploitation and destruction."
Pronoun use can lead to the kind of "us" and "them" division similar to that found in racist discourse, with "us" referring to humans and "them" to animals. Even in the animal rights literature the pronouns we, us, and our are almost always used exclusively, that is, referring only to humans. Perhaps the strongest animal rights campaigner of all, Tom Regan (1996: 37), writes, "We want and prefer things ... our enjoyment and suffering ... make[s] a difference to the quality of our lives as lived ... by us as individuals." This appears to be an inclusive use of us, we, and our, until the next sentence is read: "The same is true of ... animals."
The common way of referring to animals as "it" rather than "him" or "her" can objectify them when used in certain contexts. Objects can be "bought," "sold," and "owned," a lexical set used routinely in everyday conversation when talking about animals. This reveals the "commonsense" assumption that animals are property. It is semantically deviant to talk about someone "owning" another human, unless the term is used metaphorically, where it refers to immoral and unfair domination.
Spender's (1998) book Man Made Language shows how general discourse, evolving in a male-oriented society, both reflects and reproduces bias against women. In the same way, it is not surprising to find that general discourse reflects negative attitudes toward animals. The extent to which this influences people to condone exploitation is uncertain, but general discourse is reinforced by the discourses of groups that have commercial interests in justifying inhumane and environmentally damaging ways of treating animals.
THE DISCOURSE OF THE ANIMAL PRODUCT INDUSTRIES
One type of ideology, as mentioned above, presents oppression as being "God-given, natural, benign, [or] inevitable" (van Dijk 1997: 25). Oppression of animals is often justified quite literally as sanctioned by God through the much-quoted verse from Genesis (1:28) where God gives humans "dominion" over animals. The animal product industry, however, does not use the discourse of religion. Instead the discourse of science, among others, is used to make oppression appear natural and inevitable (see Sperling 1988).
The discourse of evolutionary biology is often invoked to equate the intensive farming and slaughter of animals with the behavior of predators in the wild, representing it as "natural." Linguistic devices are used to accomplish this, as can be seen in the article "The Natural Wrongs about Animal Rights and Animal Liberation," by Randall S. Ott, a specialist in the industry-related field of bovine reproduction.
After explicitly declaring that "people are animals," Ott's (1995) article uses collocations such as "the human animal," and "animals other than human beings" (1023–24) to emphasize a semantic classification in which, unlike general discourse, humans are included in the category "animals." He also includes humans in the semantic category of "predator":
The natural relationship between predator and prey is congruent with neither an egalitarian nor an animal rights viewpoint. ... Predator-prey relationships and a hierarchical utilisation of other beings, alive and dead, is essential to nature. (Ott 1995: 1024)
This treats as "common sense" the assumption that what applies to the (nonhuman) animal situation of predation is the same as that which applies to the human situation. However, prototypical members of the category "predators" are lions and tigers, and humans are nonprototypical members (see Rosch 1975, 1981). This deliberate inclusion of nonprototypical members (humans) in general statements about prototypical ones (lions) hides important differences between the situation of the lion hunting its prey (which no one would argue is unethical) and intensive farming of thousands of animals in cramped conditions. Differences, such as the fact that lions benefit the gene pool of their prey whereas selective breeding for meat quantity damages it, are conveniently hidden.
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Excerpted from "Animals Erased"
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Copyright © 2012 Arran Stibbe.
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