The Lowdown: Speciesism
Like all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others?
Very good. Orwell put it better than Wikipedia, which describes it as a form of discrimination based on species membership.
Why are we talking about it?
Animal rights campaigner PETA wants people to remove speciesism from their daily conversations in an attempt to curb our superiority complex over our fellow animals.
I get it. But I don’t recall the last time I disparaged a donkey or called into question the motives of a meerkat…
Don’t be so sure. PETA has listed common phrases it says should be consigned to the lexicon in the sky, some of which you will no doubt have used at some point. These include ‘kill two birds with one stone’, ‘beat a dead horse’ and ‘bring home the bacon’.
What a bunch of idiots, sorry I mean idioms... What's the alternative?
Instead, PETA suggests people now ‘bring home the bagels’ and 'feed two birds with one scone’ when they are feeling particularly efficient (in spite of the fact that the word ‘scone’ doesn't rhyme with stone for some folk). And no longer should you ‘take the bull by the horns’ but instead do the far less impressive sounding move of ‘taking the flower by the thorns’.
It sounds like PETA has jumped the shark
You can’t say that any more. Nor, presumably, can you count your chickens before they’ve hatched or put all your eggs in one basket. Whether you can still let sleeping dogs lie (surely it’s more cruel to wake them?) is unclear. The group also compared speciesism to racism and homophobia, which did not go down at all well in some quarters.
Getting people to not eat meat is one thing - getting them to change their language sounds altogether harder
Indeed, old habits die hard. As people have pointed out, it feels like PETA is flogging a dead horse - or as it would have it, ‘feeding a fed horse’.
Yes. And there’s bigger fish to fry
That’s enough now.
