Animal Equality: Language and Liberation »

Joan Dunayer is a writer whose publications include articles on a wide range of animal-rights and language issues. Her work has appeared in magazines, journals, college English textbooks, and anthologies. A former college English instructor, she has master's degrees in English education, English literature, and psychology. Animal Equality is her first book.

The first book on language and nonhuman oppression--and the most progressive animal-rights book to date Animal Equality shows that deceptive, biased words sustain injustice toward nonhuman animals. Speciesism (prejudice against nonhuman animals) survives through lies. Animal Equality's compelling evidence of nonhuman thought and emotion debunks language that characterizes other animals as unreasoning or insensitive. Vivid descriptions of hunting, sportfishing, zoos, aquaprisons, vivisection, and food-industry captivity and slaughter reveal the cruelty that misleading words legitimize and conceal. Animal Equality also uncovers the speciesist attitudes and practices underlying much racist and sexist language. Every animal nonhuman or human deserves equal consideration and protection, Joan Dunayer argues. Offering pronoun, vocabulary, and style guidelines, Animal Equality proposes new language that will bring us closer to nonhuman liberation.

Praise for Animal Equality

"Brilliant.... A great step forward in the march for justice for all persons, human and nonhuman." —Jim Mason, coauthor of Animal Factories

"Powerfully eloquent [and] illuminating. Readers will be hard-pressed to ignore the book's challenge to the moral and linguistic status quo. —Evelyn Pluhar, author of Beyond Prejudice and Professor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University

"Anyone interested either in changing the status of animals, or in the study of language and its role in culture, will find Animal Equality a valuable book. —Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University

"A major contribution to the advancement of both animal protection and our humanity." —Dr. Michael W. Fox, Senior Scholar, Bioethics, The Humane Society of the U.S.

"A giant step for animalkind. Animal Equality is intensely powerful: groundbreaking, definitive, comprehensive, compelling. Unparalleled in scope and exhaustively researched, it is a remarkable achievement. The book offers revelations about everyday language choices and an original, thorough exploration of the language of nonhuman-animal exploitation. Animal Equality establishes speciesism and language as a field of study while providing the benchmark for the field. Nothing will surpass this work for years, if ever." —Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat

"Brilliant and devastating. Animal Equality is a book of monumental importance for animal rights. A tour de force that has no equal, it documents the cruelty to which nonhuman animals are routinely subjected and shows that speciesism pervades our language. After reading the book, who can doubt that the way we talk about nonhuman animals perpetuates, even as it sometimes masks, the ruthless tyranny we exercise over them? —Tom Regan, author of The Case for Animal Rights and Professor of Philosophy, North Carolina State University

Choice - Margaret Betz Hull

Recommended for general and academic readers as groundbreaking in the animal rights literature.

Foreword by Carol J. Adams
Acknowledgments
Prologue: From Vivisection to Animal Rights
1 Speciesism and Language
2 False Categories: How We Define "Us" and "Them"
3 Animal Attributes: The Verbal Dichotomy
4 Victims Mistaken for Game: The Language of Hunting
5 Cruelty by Deception: The Language of Sportfishing
6 Freedom Denied: The Language of Zoos
7 More Speciesism on Display: The Language of "Aquariums" and "Marine Parks"
8 In the Name of Science: The Language of Vivisection
9 Feeding on Flesh, Milk, Eggs, and Lies: The Language of "Animal Agriculture"
10 Pronoun Politics
11 "Bitches," "Monkeys," and "Guinea Pigs": "Animal" Metaphors
12 Persons of Other Species: Toward Legal Redefinition
Style Guidelines: Countering Speciesism
Thesaurus: Alternatives to Speciesist Terms
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index