Living Things: The Influence of Language Over Thought
“We are called to allow our innate mercy and kindness to shine forth and to confront the indoctrinated assumptions that promote cruelty.”
-Dr. Will Tuttle,
The World Peace Diet
Animals are not living things. They are living beings. A thing is an inanimate object, whereas a being is a sentient individual.
These words – thing, being, object, individual – are all nouns, a subcategory in language to denote persons, places, things, and ideas. Generally, nonhuman animals would not be considered persons and, therefore, are things.
But does their classification truly matter? Should we actually care about calling them things instead of persons when they’re facing the very real threat of being slaughtered by the billions every day? After all, these are nothing but words on a page with no more meaning than what we give them, right?
Wrong.
Words are the closest thing to magic humans possess. With words, we create belief systems, form new languages, generate complex scientific theories, and produce art. With words, we can develop new philosophies, fall in love, craft timeless stories, and learn the history of the universe. And also with words, we can start wars, abuse others, enact and embrace oppression, and spread hatred.
Our language determines our perception of the world, determines how we express ourselves, determines how and what we think. We, as individuals and as societies, are no more than an amalgamation of all the thoughts we’ve ever had. These thoughts not only made us who we are today, but they determine who we will become in the future. With thoughts of positivity and love, we can be better people than we are today, but with thoughts of negativity and malignance, we can become the worst versions of ourselves, capable of channeling our darkness into real-world violence.
By referring to nonhuman animals as living things, even though we acknowledge that they are alive, we are demoting them to a class inferior to human animals; a group worthy of discrimination on no basis other than an institutionalized belief that they are things, too different from us to merit the respect of being classified as beings or persons. By internalizing this thought into our minds and our core beliefs, it becomes perceived as truth and fact, not as prejudice and opinion.
With this falsified “fact” lingering in the back of our minds, we can then allow ourselves to treat these de-personified persons, these sentient objects, as the things we perceive them to be. We become able to justify atrocities because, after all, they are things and they have always been things and they will continue to be things.
We can kill them for food, wear them as clothes, force them to perform for our entertainment, cut them open for experiments, and breed them to be our friends – because they are things, and things are unworthy and incapable of receiving moral consideration. Things don’t have feelings, things don’t deserve compassion, things don’t matter; those thoughts and actions are solely reserved for persons who are worthy of our respect.
But if we change this one word – living things to living beings – just this one word in the entire belief system of humanity, it could make all the difference. Because we don’t do to beings, to persons, what we do to things. We don’t kill persons for food, wear persons as clothes, force persons to perform for our entertainment, cut persons open against their will for experiments, or breed persons to be our friends – because persons are worthy and capable of receiving moral consideration. Persons have feelings, persons deserve compassion, persons matter. Living persons are worthy.
be conscious, be kind, be vegan
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"Animal Insults: Speciesist Phrases (Part 4)"
"Does Language Matter?: How Carnist Euphemisms Threaten Peace"