Many dogs, as many of us have experienced, can be derps: huskies, for example, tend to be very silly, crashing into furniture when they are excited. A common reaction to such derpy dogs is “Awe, he has one brain cell in his head,” implying that the dog is, in some important aspect, unintelligent.

In similar fashion, many people often speak to their pets with a high-pitched voice and treat them as babies, oftentimes rocking them back and forth and scolding them as someone would scold a child.

Imagine a person picking up their cat and saying, “Awe my little baby boy is hungry isn’t he?” This behavior is often funny (in the dog case) and cute (in the cat case) but is nonetheless, I argue, harmful to animals in the long run because it promotes an speciesist mindset that views animals from the wrong perspective.

“Speciesism,” as ethicist Peter Singer defines in his work Animal Liberation, is a “prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species” (pg.6).

In the same ways that people can be racist or engage in homophobic behavior (even–and especially on accident), people can be speciesist in the very same ways.

Speciesism is bad because (in just the same ways racism and homophobia are bad) it hurts people (or violates their rights if you believe in those). In fact, the vast majority of people are speciesist, since they eat other animals.

Associate Professor at George Washington University Law School Joan Schaffner identifies two features typical of a speciesist law in her book An Introduction to Animal and the Law, which I extrapolate to a speciesist mindset more broadly: anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism.

Anthropocentrism is the act of “address[ing] reality if not exclusively in terms of human values and experiences” (pg.4). Anthropomorphism, then, is the act of “failing to appreciate the inherently unique and different qualities of all other species and instead attributing human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to non-human animals” (4).

This is important because the two examples listed above are clear signs of speciesism. A speciesist worldview is harmful because it sees or treats all animals as, in some way, inferior. This worldview often allows for people to treat animals in cruel ways no one would accept for animals we already care about.

Take, for example, fishing. Fish, as many people see them, are unfeeling automatons or close to it: Think of all the vegetarians who choose to make exceptions for fish because they are “unintelligent” or “cannot feel pain.”

People see fish as being unique in some way that makes it okay to exploit them for trivial reasons.

However, it is common knowledge in animal studies that fish are given less priority because they are so different from us: they cannot make noises or facial expressions, and they do not interact with us as other animals do.

Since humans have trouble relating to fish, we have trouble empathizing with their pain. In order to mitigate speciesism in our day-to-day lives, Schaffner advocates for using good anthropomorphism and avoiding bad anthropomorphism.

Bad anthropomorphism sees animals from our human perspective, which is oftentime fallacious (imagine analyzing Eastern cultures from the viewpoint of the West). Good anthropomorphism, on the other hand, is seeing that, just like humans, animals suffer.

Besides that, animals should otherwise be understood from their perspective. It’s natural for dogs to do stupid things from our perspective, but that doens’t mean their stupid: it means they are different. We should respect animals, and that means understanding them from their own point of view.

Ian Palacios is a senior English and Philosophy major. He can be reached at [email protected] or 217-581-2812.