Animal-Sensitive Editing

I’m a veterinarian who has morphed into a copyeditor; words and animals mean a lot to me. The words we use to talk about animals have deep repercussions in the ways we think about and subsequently treat them.

Our culture’s language tends to speak of animals with a limited array of words dominated by terms related to each animal’s usefulness to humans (e.g., farm animal, lab rat, circus elephant, pet guinea pig). Our vocabulary about animals mostly treats them as one-dimensional things, easily marginalized, minimized, and stereotyped.

As we have seen in the human realm, disrespectful or inaccurate language can perpetuate considerable harm. Animals are so much more than the jobs humans assign to them. They are sentient beings with lives they want to live and perspectives that are rarely explored in mainstream journalism. Thankfully, this is starting to change. Unbiased, animal-friendly language can guide the narrative toward a more accurate, respectful, and contemporary representation of animals.

The mission of animal-sensitive editing is to assist authors in thoughtfully and truthfully representing animals across all literary genres or types of writing. Animal-sensitive editing matters in the short term to readers and in the long term to society’s treatment of animals. For me, animal-sensitive editing is overarching; it governs my approach to editing any piece of writing concerning or mentioning animals.

A few animal-sensitive editing guidelines

• Use the relative pronoun who, not that.

  • The dog who ran after the beach ball was a Dalmatian.

• Use the appropriate gender pronoun such as her, not its.

  • The opossum carried eight babies on her back.

• Discard stereotypical terms such as pests or nuisance animals when writing about, for example, mice or Canada geese.

• Discard denigrating, animal-related insults when describing negative human characteristics or behavior. Label someone despicable instead of a dog; call someone a coward instead of a chicken; say someone is treacherous instead of a snake; call someone repulsive or gluttonous instead of a pig.

• Discard euphemisms and sanitizing terms such as cull or harvest or sacrifice for more accurate terms such as kill or slaughter.

• Discard objectifying language that distances the reader from the animal; make the animal visible. For example, use the term male calves instead of veal, and chicken raised for meat instead of broiler.

For authors who want more information on how to cover and represent nonhuman animals in a fair, honest, and respectful manner, please see Animals and Media website.

For authors and readers who want to help push language and style guides in an animal-sensitive direction, please see my blog post from 5/30/21, Help the Push to Make Style Guides Animal Friendly.