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Reviewed by:
  • Animal equality: Language and liberation by Joan Dunayer
  • Sara Mills
Animal equality: Language and liberation. By Joan Dunayer. Derwood, MD: Ryce, 2001. Pp. xi, 247.

I was initially put off reading this book by the preface by Carol Adams which begins ‘Animal equality is intensely powerful: groundbreaking, definitive, comprehensive, compelling. Unparalleled in scope and exhaustively researched, it is a remarkable achievement’ (xxx); and she goes on to suggest that ‘If I were you, I’d pick up a second copy along with this one. You’re going to want to lend one out or give it away, but you won’t want to be without one yourself . . . One extra copy? I’m thinking of stocking five to ten at a time!’ I am unaccustomed to this level of hyperbole in an academic context and felt that the book could not possibly live up to expectations. Yet the book does have some very positive points: It is groundbreaking, in that there is little research on the language used to refer to animals and particularly the abuse and killing of animals, although many animal rights’ activists have analyzed the language used to refer to animals as part of their general campaigning strategy or philosophical/ethical analysis. However, at a theoretical level, I felt that this book was less insightful since research within the general field of antidiscriminatory language (antisexist, antiracist, and so on) is not sufficiently taken on board. Perhaps as a first stage in establishing a new area of research this is inevitable, and it is to Dunayer’s credit that she has set out the basis for such further study.

It is through the sheer force of the detail of this study that D’s argument is made, and it is the systematic nature of discriminatory practices against animals which need to be considered rather than individual instances of discriminatory usage. I found myself skeptical at the beginning, particularly since she starts by suggesting that we should not refer to animals and humans as if humans themselves were not animals, but we should refer instead to human and nonhuman animals, thus acknowledging our own animal nature. She also suggests that we refer to animals [End Page 581] as ‘non-human persons’ or ‘persons of other species’. This strategy seemed to me misguided since it smacks of a kind of eco-affiliation with animals, suggesting that we are more like chimpanzees and stick insects than we actually are. It is true that we share a large part of our basic biological and genetic structure with apes and that many animals have a complex system of communication and thought; but it is still the case that animals do not have universities, shopping malls, the internet, transport systems, and that humans have dominated the planet for better or worse. However, taken along with D’s argument about evolution—that generally we see evolution as leading to the human whereas ‘species don’t evolve towards greater humanness but toward greater adaptiveness in their ecological niche’ (13)—I began to see that despite the simplistic overemphasis on similarities between humans and animals, perhaps this could be a productive strategy leading to viewing animals in potentially less exploitative ways. Skeptics, however, I am sure will be put off by such arguments.

This book is at its strongest in its analysis of the different environments within which animals are exploited: hunting, zoos and aquariums, farming and vivisection. Once we see animals as a resource we feel justified in treating them as nothing more than a resource. This involves our ignoring their similarities to ourselves and their individual nature and distinctiveness. Thus, classifying cows as ‘farm-animals’ or rats as ‘laboratory-rats’ enables us to view them only as resources and ‘forget’ the long process of domestication from the wild. D’s examination of hunting as sport was particularly insightful for she shows the way in which animals are referred to as ‘stock’ and ‘game’, and terms such as ‘manage’, ‘cull’, or ‘control’ are used as euphemisms for ‘kill’. She draws attention to the way US hunters have stressed the conservation nature of their killing of animals, just as the fox-hunting lobby has in Britain...

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