1/3 - What a greedy pig. He is stubborn as a mule. Such a bitch!... What if, without our realizing it, our language participated in a symbolic violence inflicted on animals? In her interview with Le Boudoir Numérique in three parts, the biologist Marie-Claude Marsolier, author of the book Le mépris des “bêtes”, un lexique de la ségrégation animale (Contempt for “beasts”, a lexicon of animal segregation), explains the mechanisms of rejection and devaluation of animals, as well as the denial of their sufferings which condones their exploitation, especially in the fashion industry.

By Ludmilla Intravaia

Le Boudoir Numérique: In your book, you qualify the French lexicon, our language as “misothère”. What does that mean?

Marie-Claude Marsolier, author of the book Le mépris des “bêtes” (Contempt for “beasts”): The term misothère is composed from two Greek words, miseô which means “to hate” and thêrion which designates non-human animals. Misothère means: “who hates non-human animals.” We are less used to thêrion in French than to zôion, from which are constructed the words zoo, zoologie (zoology, AN), zoologue (zoologist, AN), etc., because zôion designates all animals, including humans. Thêrion designates wild animals and is found in several words in the French language such as euthérien (eutherian, AN) and métathérien (metatherian, AN) qualifying mammals, or even thériomorphe (theriomorph, AN). A theriomorphic figure, for example, is a figure that has the shape of a non-human animal. I thought I had invented the word misothère. But if the term misothère is not in the dictionaries, by searching on Google, one finds some occurrences of it coming from people who, they too, spontaneously thought that, as on the model of misanthrope and misogyne (misogynist, AN), one could say misothère. In my book, I invite readers to be careful of what we say, because our language is riddled with allusions, ready-made expressions, implicit notions, very pejorative to other animals. It comes a long way. And it's not specific to French. This is already found in Latin. Like much of our culture, we inherited this very pejorative conception of other animals from the Romans, a conception reinforced by the use, by the exploitation we make of them. If we are not careful, we commonly use expressions that reinforce the idea that other animals are despicable, violent, unimportant, devoid of individuality and therefore, that we have every right to exploit and kill them.

In your book, you describe three mechanisms of symbolic violence inflicted on animals through language, the first of which aiming at creating an opposition between humans and other animals. It is true that in our everyday language, we often tend to speak in terms of "us and the animals", even when we are sensitive to the fight against animal suffering. How come that this opposition between humans and animals is so ingrained in our language?

As I said, I think that it really comes a long way. The ancient philosophers, especially the Stoics, had a tripartite view of the world, including gods, humans and other animals, beasts. Humans, who have spiritual relationships with the gods, are neither gods nor beasts, they are in between but can be degraded into non-human animals. Plato believes in metempsychosis, that souls circulate from one body to another and that human souls can, at the end of a particularly negative life, find themselves in animal bodies, non-human bodies that are all the more contemptible as the conduct of the previous human life has been bad. As many Greeks believed in metempsychosis, killing non-human animals could be problematic, since it might harm souls that had once belonged to human bodies. Pythagoras defended vegetarianism by arguing that if you killed a non-human animal you were never sure you would not kill a loved one, your friend or your grandfather. The migration of souls made this structuring into three parts, gods, humans and non-humans, more ambiguous in antiquity. With Christianity, this tripartition remained but it solidified, because there was no longer this possibility of metempsychosis between humans and non-humans. Humans are elected by God who created them in his image and they are radically different from all other sentient beings. So, a complete barrier was established between humans and other animals. Now people say that God has disappeared. Humans, in addition to their place, have taken that of God. But the barrier with non-humans persists and, in the opinion of many, it persists because the exploitation of non-humans is dramatic. Incredibly dramatic. The exploitation that we make of non-humans is incompatible with the disappearance of a barrier between them and us. It is the facts, our concrete activities that impose this barrier today. This barrier between humans and non-humans is maintained and is active, every day, in slaughterhouses and consistently found in our language. It's very difficult today to talk about non-human people, because killing people, even in a slaughterhouse, is no longer called slaughter. It's called murder. Thus, our actions guide our language, so that we cannot be seen as assassins or murderers. Our language both reflects and perpetuates the oppression and physical abuse we impose on other animals.

What do you think of the term “sentient beings” to talk about animals? Or should we go for something else, for example “non-human animals” or “non-human people”?

The word animal has a precise meaning, from a biological point of view. It designates the metazoans. Metazoa constitute a large category of living organisms, like there are the category of plants and the category of bacteria, which brings together organisms made up of cells with a nucleus, which must feed on organic molecules. We eat other living organisms, whether plants or animals, because we are unable to make our own constituents from mineral molecules. So if we want to talk about all animals, including ourselves, using the term animal is fine. For me, animal is not pejorative, in a scientific sense. I have no problem considering that I am an animal. If we only want to talk about non-human animals, it is difficult to group them under the term "sentient beings" because we too are sentient beings. In fact, non-human animals are so different, that there is not a single characteristic that all non-human animals possess that does not belong to humans. We cannot define them positively. We cannot say: non-human animals all have, for example, feathers. So if we really want to talk about non-human animals, we have to resort to this negative categorization. There is no rigorous way to encompass other animals, without saying “non-human animals”, in the same way that if we wanted to talk about all mammals except dolphins, there would be no other possibility than to use the expression “non-dolphin mammals”. The sense of the term person is more narrow than animal, because the notion of person includes that of a nervous system, with neurons grouped together in the form of ganglia or brain. Jellyfish, for example, do not have such nervous systems. So to say that jellyfish are people doesn't seem relevant. According to the observations of ethologists, the notion of person in the current sense of "individual possessing specific psychic, emotional and cognitive characteristics, who plays a singular role in a network of social relations, which makes him or her unique", can apply to vertebrates, cephalopods, probably ants and other insects. “Non-human animals” is what still seems to me the most rigorous, if we want to talk about other animals.

Using the words "friend" or "friendship" to describe the relationship you have with your pet is sometimes called anthropomorphism. What do you think of that?

If you express that you feel friendship for your cat, I think people don't mind too much, because you are the one feeling something. If you say: “How I feel towards this cat, I call it friendship because it is very similar to what I feel in other contexts towards humans”, you know your feelings. Speaking of the friendship a human feels for a non-human animal, I don't see how one could object to that. The context in which people have more problems with is talking about the feeling of friendship that a non-human animal feels.

In relation to the feelings of animals, you explain in your book that they have behaviors, emotions very similar to ours, in fact...

Already in the second century, Plutarch castigated his contemporaries who considered that non-human animals cannot be sad or angry, that they simply appear as such, without really being so. The fundamental problem is that you can't be in their heads. In the same way that we cannot be in the head of another human being than us. In a way, we, the human beings, trust each other. When someone says to us: “I am your friend”, we imagine that it's the same as what we feel for the people we love. Either way, we will never have direct access to the mental states of other people, human or non-human. All that is accessible to us are behaviors. When you see a dog who shows affectionate behavior towards you, you can draw the conclusion that it is the attitude of a sensitive being who takes care of you, who will try to please you. For you, it's friendship. And I don't see why you couldn't call it friendship. The most rigorous thing to do is to appeal to objective criteria to qualify something, for example, friendship or sadness. We can see dogs who look really sad, who tilt their heads, who are lying on the ground, etc. Insofar as these behaviors are similar to those of human beings who feel sadness, I do not see how one could reject this word sad for non-human animals.

In your book, you refer to the concepts of mentaphobia and anthropodenial, respectively from the ethologists Donald Griffin and Frans de Waal, which encompass the prejudices of “denying all non-human animals the experience of mental states similar to ours”. Why are mentaphobia and anthropodenial so strong in our society?

This is what allows us to have three million people killed in slaughterhouses every day in France. From the moment when people can seriously say that these animals that are slaughtered can be afraid, be friends with each other, that they have a sensitivity, that they feel emotions, which has been demonstrated beyond doubt, these slaughters become much more complicated. Behavioral scientists who study non-human animals, not under exploitative conditions, on factory farms, but in free-roaming groups, such as monkey communities, for example, demonstrate that each individual is special. In dolphin groups, some individuals are more important for group cohesion than others. Each elephant clan is headed by a specific individual, a matriarch. Elephants don't randomly draw lots every day to decide what they're going to do : they follow their matriarch. As mentioned above, scientific studies show that many non-human animals are individuals with unique characteristics which, for us, correspond to the notion of person, with the emotional states, cognitive and learning capacities that come with it. It's all very disturbing when it comes to oppressing or killing them. And this is the reason why mentaphobia and anthropodenia persist in our language. Again, the divide between humans and non-humans already existed in classical antiquity but Judaism, Christianity, Islam, monotheistic religions in general made humans play a very special role that really institutionalized this difference. Humans, God's darlings, have all rights over non-human animals. Considering the oppression that other animals are subjected to, it is still very difficult today to get rid of this fracture and to be able to say about other animals that they feel friendship or that they are people.

* Read the second part of Marie-Claude Marsolier's interview on Le Boudoir Numérique: "Talking about animal welfare in breeding farms is an Orwellian sleight of hand".

* Read the last part of Marie-Claude Marsolier's interview on Le Boudoir Numérique : "Let's invent new words to designate plant-based materials in fashion".

* Le Boudoir Numérique met Marie-Claude Marsolier at a conference organized on March 22, 2021 by the animal protection association Paris Animaux Zoopolis (PAZ) Watch the video recording of the event here. PAZ website is there.

* The book Le mépris des “bêtes”, un lexique de la ségrégation animale (Contempt for “beasts”, a lexicon of animal segregation) by Marie-Claude Marsolier was published on September 9, 2020 at Presses Universitaires de France (PUF).

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