The animalization of scapegoated demographics is certainly not unique to Donald Trump. The trick has been utilized by fascists of times gone by (but who very much haunt the present)—Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao. Their victims no longer remain human but instead are transfigured into rats, lice, or cockroaches—pests and vermin whose only value stems from their absence and, if present, then extermination. The status of the human is conditional—American slavery or the Holocaust demonstrates this fact far too well. But I’d argue that the actual moment of violence is not any physical act but when a fellow human ceases to be called a human. After all, exterminating a cockroach, rat, or louse is a common and encouraged practice; it’s ethical because there are no ethics to consider regarding such “vermin.” The extermination of a human, however, is not. To borrow the philosophy of the linguist J.L. Austin—the precursor to Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler—some words do. Thus, to recognize another as a human linguistically is to establish a relationship of ethics, a list of inalienable obligations. It’s to practice, taking the phrase from Lori Gruen, relational dignity. Animals are not given such considerations. Indeed, entire industries are dedicated to the humiliation of other species: trophy hunts, circuses, dog fights, zoos, and aquariums. And the conditions animals are forced to live in on factory farms—no freedom of movement, no bodily autonomy, no privacy, already “dead” when born —are less than dignified. It should not be missed that factory-farmed animals, too, live a perpetual genocide, but as of now, there is no ethical status to fall from or return to—it is simply the way things are. This is all to say: to recognize another as an animal designates that being as anything less than man’s “fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers,” to use Derrida’s claim.
Naturally, the proposal that words harm—materialize physical effects—conflicts with a basic understanding of the First Amendment protection of free speech. Should speech be regulated, then? No, but as the nation faces a very real threat of authoritarianism, the degradation of “undesirables” has already begun. Still, opposition of any kind must resist the humanistic inclination to replicate the species hierarchy that allowed the horrors of slavery or the Holocaust. It is unethical to compare a human to an animal because the animal is that which lacks an ethical consideration or obligation. However, the fundamental injustice is not the comparison of a human to an animal but rather the assumed lack of moral consideration that buttresses the human/animal binary. That is, attempts at solidarity with Haitian migrants (and other animalized communities) by animal advocates who reaffirm a population’s humanity risk being the obstacle to their cause by enforcing the long-established species hierarchy of ethics.
This argument does not insinuate that the anti-fascist crowd should say—or rather, do— nothing. But to counter the abundance of mean words in Trump’s rhetoric, animal advocates cannot merely refute, rebuke, or deny such subjectifying language. Productive resistance, or mean(ingful) words, requires a spiral shape, destination unknown, instead of the enclosed circle of call and response that shapes the country’s current accusatory and reactionary politics. The use of “the animal” seemingly goes uninterrogated in animal advocacy and its many incarnations. Thus, an idea such as animal law under the current formulation of the animal is an oxymoron because “the animal” is definitionally and ontologically that which lacks legal standing. Of course, animal law aims to change such a status. Still, it’s no mistake that much of the legal work and scholarship (for legal recognition, at least) primarily focuses on animals that display humanistic markers of intelligence and sentience: elephants, chimpanzees, whales, and dolphins; efforts seek the recognition of humanity in non-humans, and the resultant litmus test excludes the vermin which populate fascist societies. So, the animal advocacy at play fails to dissolve the animal/human binary that originates species inequality, leaves unquestioned the perception of human supremacy, and fails to curb the weaponized animalization of populations. (To) mean words reject reactionary language and urge intention. When “the animal” and its avatars are wielded in contemporary American political rhetoric, perhaps a suitable, if not slightly Seussian, response is: “What’s so bad about being an animal? Even a rat, cockroach, or louse?” Such a question prompts consideration for what “the animal” in animal law and advocacy means and requires the reconsideration of what species are worthy of ethical treatment and which species are unjustly stigmatized because of their distant ontological proximity to humans; such a question de-powers the fascist rhetoric infecting the nation. In other words, such a question, such language, does something. When concerning national or global dilemmas, it may be all that a sole individual can do: to value something other than the (idea of the) self, to engage in a relationship of ethics.
