Animal Insults: Speciesist Phrases (Part 4)

Mar 22, 2021

"Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny."
-Lao Tzu

Ants in your pants

To have ants in your pants is to be restless or, pardon the pun, antsy. Unlike many words and phrases, this one seems to have quite a literal meaning because, after all, if ants were to actually infiltrate your trousers, there would doubtless be some discomfort, agitation, and anxious energy to evict them and ensure they didn't return again. However, the likelihood of something like this ever occurring is pretty low -- animals, insects included, generally prefer to avoid humans -- except on the rare occurrences when humans disturb their work or home. In those cases, humans are usually the ones to blame and would deserve that "ants in the pants" feeling. Additionally, there are other instances in which one would feel restless and uneasy without the need to involve ants in the idiom; perhaps we could change this phrase to something like "poison ivy on your hiney" or "sticks in your socks."

Bread and butter

This phrase is often used to indicate something that is normal or commonplace. For example, conducting interviews is a reporter's bread and butter. It can also indicate someone's income or their means of living, which likely originates from buttered bread being a staple in western diets for centuries. Even the poorest earners would use their meager wages to pay for their bread and butter first to go along with any other food they could make or buy.

Clutch your pearls

Unlike the previous phrase, this is one that would, in the past, only be relevant to those able to afford superfluous luxury items, such as a strand of pearls. Like a conservative curmudgeonly grandmother's reaction to you "coming out" as a vegan, to clutch your pearls is to be highly affronted or scandalized.

Crocodile tears

To cry crocodile tears is to feign sorrow or grief. This is perhaps one of the most egregiously anthropomorphic phrases on this list because the idiom stems from the fact that crocodiles' eyes sometimes tear up when eating. From our narrow human perspective, we view that as the crocodile faking regret for killing an animal to live and have therefore forced this negative, mocking stigma upon them for centuries. Maybe we should convert this phrase to "pet lover tears" or "Thanksgiving tears" to shed light on the false sympathy of human "animal lovers."

Frog in your throat

Having a frog in your throat would be an uncomfortable sensation indeed, and it evokes images of witchy sacrifices or medieval medical practices. Luckily, the phrase is not so literal. Simply, having a sore or dry throat makes one's voice sound similar to the rasp or croak of a frog.

Let the cat out of the bag

The secret's out on what this means, and the origins are as dark as the phrase indicates. (After all, how many reasons are there for a cat to be in a bag?) At markets where animals were bought and sold, tricky salesmen, after selling a piglet, would swap them out with a cat to give to the unsuspecting buyer. Once home, upon opening the bag, the cat would be released instead of the pig, showing the customer that they'd been swindled. Today, letting the cat out of the bag is less harmful to the animals of its origins, but releasing a secret that was meant to be hidden can still cause quite a bit of damage.

More than one way to skin a cat

Quite a barbaric phrase indeed, the meaning of there being more than one way to skin a cat is that there are several methods one could use to achieve some particular goal. This phrase actually originates from older sayings like "there are more ways to kill a cat than choking [them] with cream" and "there are more ways to kill a dog than hanging," though the true origins of these cruel proverbs seem to have been lost to time.

Put lipstick on a pig

This is probably my least favorite phrase on this list (which is really saying something) for a variety of reasons. To get the requisite definition out of the way, putting lipstick on a pig indicates that some particular act is ultimately futile because, at the end of the day, you're still left with a pig. This indicates that pigs are inherently invaluable or worthless simply because they are pigs; this anthropocentric perspective is often at the root of human languages and actions.

Also, it carries a connotation that pigs are inherently ugly -- an absurd concept, as if the attractiveness (whatever that means) of other species should be directly compared to traditional, western, female beauty standards -- and putting makeup on them will never be enough to hide that fact. Finally, we can't deny the misogyny here, proclaiming that makeup makes women more attractive, but not even that can make a homely woman beautiful. While there is potential for a positive message here, like a pretty face can't hide an ugly heart, it's hidden far too deep to be readily extracted each time this phrase is used, and it still doesn't address the blatant speciesism.

*Please see The Pornography of Meat by Carol J. Adams to learn more about how femininity is used in the depersonification of nonhuman animals.

Quiet as a mouse

A person who is as quiet as a mouse is very, perhaps unusually, silent or timid. However, mice can be rowdy little critters, especially if you've ever had a family move into your home, so this phrase only makes sense if you compare the noise levels produced by one solitary mouse to a much larger animal like, say, an elephant. An anti-speciesist version of this phrase could be "quiet as a ghost."

See how the sausage is made

Pull back the curtain to observe how your favorite products are made, and you might not like the view. When you see how the sausage is made, you are getting a look into the unsavory practices of how something is produced. Clearly, the commonality of this phrase indicates that we all know how unpleasant and disgusting, perhaps even downright inhumane, the process of converting animals into separate body parts and then into food products truly is, but as long we don't take a peek to see it with our own eyes, we can continue to blissfully consume without ever knowing the full truth.

This place is a zoo

Zoos are touted as places of family-friendly fun and education, but this idiom shows how we really perceive them. Unfortunately, its usage negatively refers to the animals imprisoned in zoos and not to the facilities themselves. To say that a place is like a zoo, the image created in one's mind is not of hopeless creatures trapped in too-small cages but of rowdy animals running around maniacally and bouncing off the walls. Perhaps the phrase is meant to place us in the mind of animals who are stir-crazy, jailed with a life sentence yet have committed no crime, and make us feel sympathy for their plight, but I have little faith that it was created with the mental health of animals in mind.

Wild goose chase

A wild goose chase is something that wastes time, money, or other resources all for something that ultimately does not exist or cannot be attained. Surprisingly, the phrase has nothing to do with geese, and it was created through the exploitation of horses used in the racing industry. A Wild Geese Chase was a kind of race in which jockeys forced their horses to ride in a formation similar to how geese fly, but the course was designed to be unpredictable, giving the perception of riding without a known goal.

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