Stop Insulting Your Companion Animals by Calling Them "Pets"!

And you call yourself an "animal lover". How could you demean your "companion animals" by continuing to call them "pets". I mean really.

Domestic dogs, cats, hamsters or budgerigars should be rebranded as “companion animals” while owners should be known as “human carers”, they insist.
Even terms such as wildlife are dismissed as insulting to the animals concerned – who should instead be known as “free-living”, the academics including an Oxford professor suggest.
The call comes from the editors of then Journal of Animal Ethics, a new academic publication devoted to the issue.

The editors, Professors Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn of Penn State University, added more offensive phrases of the English language that need to be stamped out:

Phrases such as “sly as a fox, “eat like a pig” or “drunk as a skunk” are all unfair to animals, they claim.
“We shall not be able to think clearly unless we discipline ourselves to use less than partial adjectives in our exploration of animals and our moral relations with them," they say.

Link

Newest 5

Newest 5 Comments

I'm not exactly sure how a word that is an ENDEARMENT -- as in "my darling, my pet" -- is supposed to be insulting. The first recorded use of "pet", around 1500, is in the sense of "indulged child", which surely fits in with the treatment of many of today's "animal companions."

Abusive comment hidden. (Show it anyway.)

Animals hear tone, not words.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBO8c7v7guI

Abusive comment hidden. (Show it anyway.)

Let's add this guy to the long list of people who want to control what we say and how we say it.

Abusive comment hidden. (Show it anyway.)

They are animals, and should be treated as animals have been treated for thousands of years; as a species that's below us, that is only there to serve, and to provide for us humans. Might seem terrible, but that's the nature of animals and humans. Humans; masters; animals; slaves. What these peasants are trying to do is nothing more than confuse the masses further, or rather, to keep tying the noose tighter with their political correctness BS.
Why should we be dictated on what we can and cannot say?