S6. E2: Carrie Packwood Freeman: How We Talk About Animals
“We're all just participating in a culture that really isn't of our choice… we just grew up in this culture, but we can start questioning things and just not be afraid to say that we love other animals that they're astounding, and that we care about the environment and we want to be less impactful… you just have to be willing to say things that maybe other people haven't heard you say yet.”
- Carrie P. Freeman
Carrie Packwood Freeman is an associate professor of communications at Georgia State University. She's a critical cultural studies media researcher and her work has been published in over 20 scholarly books and journals.
She's also the co-author of Animals and Media, a style guideline web resource for media professionals.
Animals and Media and In Defense of Animals recently partnered to call for an update to the Associated Press Stylebook’s recommendation on the use of personal pronouns for nonhuman animals, so that animals in news stories would be identified as, "she/her/hers and he/him/his when their sex is known, regardless of species, and the gender-neutral they, or he/she, or his/hers when their sex is unknown."
The letter is signed by renowned conservationist, Jane Goodall, as well as 80 other leaders, scholars, and advocates fighting for a better world for animals:
To: Paula Froke Editor of The Associated Press Stylebook and executive director of The Associated Press Media Editors
In the 1960s, world-renowned ethologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall submitted her first scientific paper on chimpanzees that was promptly returned to her to be edited. Every place she had written he or she to describe a chimpanzee had been replaced with it, and every who had been replaced with which.
Goodall refused to budge and won a small battle for nonhuman animals back then, but decades later we’re still waiting for respected style guides like The Associated Press Stylebook to catch up on the relative pronouns used to describe them.
In an age struggling with industrialized animal cruelty, the sixth mass extinction of species, a climate crisis, and the exploitation of the natural world, the way we use language influences the way we see our relationship with our environment and the nonhuman animals we share it with.
You can read the full letter here.
Carrie is here to talk about why it's so important that we change the way that we talk about animals in the media, in entertainment and in regular everyday conversation. Please listen and share.
Read the Letter to the Associated Press
Learn More About Animals and Media
Learn More About In Defense of Animals
Check Out Carrie’s Books and Papers
Like Carrie on Facebook
Listen to Carri'e’s Radio Show: In Tune to Nature
Transcript:
Carrie: [00:00:15] There's some reality TV show where there's a bunch of people trying to survive on an island. You don't want to be the vegan on that island because you're definitely going to get kicked off, probably in the second episode. Everyone's going to be like, Nope, because we won't take one for the team because you're not going to kill that possum.
Elizabeth: [00:00:39] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Specie’s Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Carrie Packwood Freeman. Carrie is an Associate Professor of communications at Georgia State University. She's a critical cultural studies media researcher and has published in over 20 scholarly books and journals, and she is co-author of Animals and Media, a style guideline web resource for media professionals. Carrie and I met because we're part of a group calling for an update to the Associated Press Stylebook, recommending the use of personal pronouns for non-human animals. Carrie is here today to talk about what that means, why it's so important that we change the way that we talk about animals and the press in the media and in regular everyday conversation.
Elizabeth: [00:02:02] Carrie thank you so much for being here today.
Carrie: [00:02:05] Thanks for having me, I'm really pleased to be here. I love this podcast.
Elizabeth: [00:02:08] There's so many things I want to talk about, but before we get there, I would like to go back and learn a little bit about you because you've been in the animal rights movement since the 90s, you've been your old school. How did this start? Did you grow up around animals? Were you vegan young?
Carrie: [00:02:28] All of that sounds awesome, and I wish I was one of those children that you hear about that tells their parents, forget it, we're not eating meat anymore because we're not putting animals in the oven. But I wasn't that nice as a kid. I mean, I liked animals, but I didn't make the connection and my parents didn't either. I mean, we had cats but we didn't stop eating animals. It really wasn't until I went off to University of Florida, and then there was a girl who was vegan on my dorm floor. I don't think I knew anybody who was vegan before that time. She took me to a students meeting for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that was at University of Florida. So this would have been like in 1989, and that really was very eye-opening for me. It's horrifying, but it's also extremely motivating in a way like you're so outraged that you feel like you really need to do something. I just kind of said to myself, like, “OK, when I graduate, I'm going to go vegetarian”. So that's what I did. I cut out certain animals at a time. The land animals, then the birds and then the fish and I did that for a few years. Then I got an invitation to do an internship at PETA. It was a good push for me to get rid of my leather shoes and your leather watch band and start to go vegan. At the time, I had moved to South Florida. So it wasn't like a very vegan friendly place in Fort Myers, Florida, at the time. However, I ended up starting a vegetarian society there. I ran it for about four years,
Elizabeth: [00:04:01] So you kind of went full in once you started this thing in Florida.
Carrie: [00:04:04] I was really convinced if you want to think about it, people have been vegetarian for centuries, right?
Elizabeth: [00:04:14] Yes.
Carrie: [00:04:15] Then there's the arguments that humans initially weren't really meat eaters to begin with. So you know that even though we like to have this caveman mentality that we've always been killing animals, it's probably not for most of our history, we would probably plant eaters.
Elizabeth: [00:04:24] So now you do four years running the society in Florida, The Vegetarian Society.
Carrie: [00:04:32] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:04:33] Do you know now that your life is going to be connected to this kind of work?
Carrie: [00:04:34] Oh yeah. I think for those of us that get really into animal rights, it's similar to feminism and and many other types of justice advocacy. It really changes your whole outlook. You suddenly just look at the world and you see all the injustice everywhere and you see the objectification. That was my next step, going to grad school. I was thinking, Well, either I need to go work for an animal rights organization or I can study these things. I'm really interested in the cultural route to change or the popular culture and the way we represent these issues. When I did start in communication, it wasn't an obvious fit because back in the day and really maybe even a lot now when you were reading animal rights books, they were written by philosophers or maybe legal scholars. So there wasn't a lot in academia. You didn't know where you should go to get a degree. So I just said, “Well, OK, the media makes sense. I'll learn to be a media scholar. Then the topic I'll choose to write about is animals”. So even though a lot of my professors didn't write on that topic, they just taught me to be a good researcher. Then I wrote about animals.
Elizabeth: [00:05:44] When did animals and media start?
Carrie: [00:05:46] That was in 2014 that Dr. Deborah Emerson and I, she was my dissertation advisor from University of Oregon, and we both were vegetarians and communication media scholars. So we tried to take some of the scholarship that we were publishing in academic journals and just translate it to the practical realm and say “here's a website, If you're a journalist here's some guidelines to be friendlier and more accurate in your representation of other animals.” And we also have guidelines for people who do advertising, people in public relations. Then a pretty extensive outline of guidelines for the entertainment, media, television and movies. There's a lot of guides out there for the media on how to be more thoughtful representations of human minority groups who have been represented poorly or not represented at all, misrepresented. That was kind of the inspiration for this.
Elizabeth: [00:06:40] What were you noticing and what were like gaping holes that were happening and are happening in journalism and media, especially.
Carrie: [00:06:48] From a broad standpoint there's just the fact that we need to include the animal perspective more. Not just like when they're a problem, but just the idea that they deserve to be sources of news. The idea is that they are affected by the events that are happening that are newsworthy. Somebody needs to bring in that perspective of all the other animals besides just the human animal.
Elizabeth: [00:07:13] Well, you give an example of getting an animal's perspective like a situation where it happens all the time.
Carrie: [00:07:19] A lot of times it's just asking the news to bring in the animal's perspective. Even when they're talking about animal issues, they often are not talking about the animals, they're talking about us. Back when I did my master's thesis, it was about news coverage of farmed animals. At the University of Georgia in the early two thousands, there was the foot and mouth disease crisis, and kind of Mad Cow was an issue in England. They were just like murdering all these cows and sheep because of foot and mouth disease. The journalists were just standing there with the microphone in front of a mass grave and talking about it as an economic issue, or maybe a public health issue. But it's also just injustice. So that's what we're also asking. For journalists to think of them as fellow sentient beings, because every time journalists leave out the non-human animals perspective, it's just like saying, “well, it just doesn't matter. They're just food objects. So we might as well kill them because if we can't eat them and make money off them because they're they've got this kind of disease, then let's just murder them, who cares”. If we just let that go without saying anything about it, then that just normalizes the fact that we're mass producing animals?
Elizabeth: [00:08:35] What's been some of the response, when journalists come and look at your website?
Carrie: [00:08:40] I thought I would hear a lot of criticism and I don't, because it probably just gets ignored because you're always able to ignore animal issues, right? You get a pass on doing that. If you want to just ignore it, usually no one's going to say anything to you. I think that it's not getting the criticisms I thought it would because also we put this together, we didn't just do it as a soft animal welfare kind of thing. No, we do say that we all should be critiquing our use of animals, not just saying, “Oh, look, let's get a camera in there to show how animals are mistreated by industry”. But let's have narratives in journalism that actually question whether or not we should be eating animals.
Elizabeth: [00:09:24] Which I think is going to happen. I mean, I think I think it is. I think people will be using your website more and more as the years go on
Carrie: [00:09:32] That's right.
Elizabeth: [00:09:34] Because like this is where the world's going.
Carrie: [00:09:36] At the time when it came out in 2014. I think since then, we've sent press releases out just to let all the major media organizations know about it. But I think really our main strategy is to get people who care about animals, whether you're in the media or not. When you write a letter to the editor or you send a note to a company because you notice they used animals in their advertising and you want to say whether that's positive or negative. Now you could go to the animals and media talk site and give your letter a little bit more weight and credibility to say, here's a specific guideline. I think it would benefit you to follow and take it seriously. So I really think that's one of the main ways that other media is going to hear about this. If we, as animal advocates, actually reach out and say, there's something you left out of this story, here's some guidelines on incorporation of animal rights perspectives or bringing in an animal ethnologist to talk about the way the animals were communicating about their captivity. I think we, as animal activists, can ask journalists to do this.
Elizabeth: [00:10:44] Since you started and got involved in all of this, I'm sure you are noticing even before how animals were portrayed in media and journalism. So, during the past couple of decades, have you seen a shift in and how they are portrayed?
Carrie: [00:10:58] One of the most obvious is the term Vegan, and the notion of being Vegan is much more mainstream now. Back in the nineties or in the early two thousands, you didn't even really use the word vegan. You said vegetarian and then you meant vegan. Because that's what I did in my dissertation, on animal rights advocacy messages for veganism. So like all the vegan, the Y vegan pamphlets and T-shirts and websites go veg websites. That was probably around two thousand six or seven. Even all the animal rights organizations were still saying vegetarian, but they meant vegan because when you looked at the recipes in the booklet, they were all vegan. I feel like we've actually mainstreamed the word vegan.
Elizabeth: [00:11:45] Vegan had such a bad rap, right? I remember I was a vegetarian in high school and I still thought vegans were weird. That's what you heard. I didn't know any vegetarians, or it was just so not in my face. I was like 13. But then people would talk to me about it, adults would all tell me vegans are weird, Vegans had a really bad rap back then, you know, in the sense of people were kind of afraid of it all. Whereas now it's plant based, it's very embraced and the word doesn't have negative connotations.
Carrie: [00:12:22] Yeah, I mean, it probably still does to some extent, certainly in certain circles. I think plant based has become the new term because also plants is not a very loaded term, unlike soy or tofu. We're still the butt of some jokes.
Elizabeth: [00:12:43] Oh yeah.
Carrie: [00:12:44] Especially if there's some reality TV show where, like, there's a bunch of people trying to survive on an island. You don't want to be the vegan on that island because you're definitely going to get kicked off, probably in the second episode, because everyone's going to be like, Nope. Because they won't take one for the team because you're not going to kill that possum. But then you have somebody like Lisa Simpson, which one of the best things that ever happened was Paul McCartney insisting that Lisa Simpson on The Simpsons go vegetarian. So that he would appear on The Simpsons and then she stayed vegetarian forever, and she's the best, smartest, most noble character on the show.
Elizabeth: [00:13:16] Animals in media and in defense of animals are doing a partnership right now. Will you talk about that and what you're asking the AP to do?
Carrie: [00:13:24] Alisha, from the in Defense of Animals group, came to me and Deb Maskin and was saying that they were thinking it in defense of animals to ask The Associated Press to update its style guidelines related to the way they talk about non-human animals. The Associated Press creates a style guideline that is the main thing that journalists and even PR people use for formatting there. The way they talk about anything and their writing, they have a whole paragraph on how you should treat animals and talk about them. One of the problems with it is that it instructs journalists that you only have to bother with saying he or she is related to an animal if they have a name or you know them. So in that case, I feel like they're just privileging your kind of popular companion animal. But even not a stray dog, but only somebody's dog who has a name because most of the time when we talk about non-human animals, we don't know their sex. But it is just the wrong word because it's inanimate. I know it's a problem. It's a problem for humans, too, that we do not have a singular, gender neutral pronoun. We have it in the plural with “they.” One of our suggestions is to switch to the plural and say “they” even when you're talking about an individual animal, you might be talking about a chick in the nest. But if you don't know the sex of the chick, you could just say they are learning to fly. So that's the main thing we're asking for is to just either say he or she or they.
Elizabeth: [00:15:01] Which doesn't seem that crazy, it's not a big ask.
Carrie: [00:15:04] Yeah, but to be honest, I mean, Elizabeth. Have you noticed that a lot of us, even in the animal rights movement, will say ”it”?
Elizabeth: [00:15:14] Yes.
Carrie: [00:15:15] It's hard to avoid because it's so common in society and we don't do it for humans. We don't talk about humans that way. But for any wildlife or other animals everyone says “it”. Not everyone, but a lot of people. So actually you have to train yourself to avoid it.
Elizabeth: [00:15:29] A lot of things on your website, you know that needs to change, so much as to have it that we've done for our whole lives, right? And this is a big one. The ”it” thing. You do need to train yourselves. But if you start seeing it in the media, the word “it” is not used.
Carrie: [00:15:49] Right. That's really the whole premise of the whole animals and media site, is that media is so influential to our culture and our cultural values. What becomes normal is that if all the journalists started talking about, “oh, a pig escaped from the truck on the way to slaughter he or she is now running around in the woods and we're trying to capture him or her”, that would make a big difference. Also, I think when you say him, her or they. You understand that someone, that's another thing we ask in animals and media is to use someone or somebody, but don't say something. We also ask to use the pronoun who instead of that or which, like animals who blah blah blah. Just some of the courtesy we give to the human animal as sentient beings should be extended to other animals because it's actually accurate to do that. This is actually just the truth that they tend to be gendered beings or even if they were intersex. In some senses, some animals might be or just, you know, as some humans are intersex or gender nonbinary, then they maybe should be. The more that's probably the best route to go would be saying they.
Elizabeth: [00:17:10] Not only is it respectful, but when you say the pig escaped from slaughter and they caught her or and all of a sudden she becomes a her. Then it becomes a sentient being versus a sausage.
Carrie: [00:17:20] Yes,
Elizabeth: [00:17:21] Right?
Carrie: [00:17:25] They caught it, and now it is on your plate.
Elizabeth: [00:17:29] Yeah and so if you're reading that and if you eat meat or you haven't really thought about it, those kinds of things. It starts to just be little bits, little seeds, and they're not like, you know, secretive seeds. It's just seeds of, Hey, this is a sentient being. It came from somewhere, right? It didn't just end up in the grocery.
Carrie: [00:17:47] Right. Think about another thing on our animals and media list is words that are industry terms. We wanted journalists and documentarians to understand that they were using a biased term. If you say poultry, if you say pork, if you say livestock and seafood. That's not a neutral term. I know it, maybe it seems like it because it's so normalized. But I mean, the word livestock, living stock that just objectifies animals. I mean, obviously, seafood, if that's how we refer to marine animals, is there just food that lives in the sea for us? I mean, that's a problem. That's a problem. What we're asking journalists is actually then to just say the species name, just say salmon or cows or pigs or geese or ducks, rather than using some kind of industry terminology that lumps them all together as an object while they're still alive. Your poultry, you're like already in our mind, you're on someone's plate, even though you're walking around. We see that it just as a neutral, accurate term, actually just to say the species name. We also introduced the concept that I think is becoming more popular of putting a verb in the description of an animal so that like, you're not just saying someone is a farm animal, you're saying they're a farmed animal, just like you're saying, they're not a lab rat, they're a rat who is being used in the biomedical field. As a research subject, I for many years used the term farmed animals to put that verb in there, like they didn't choose to be farmed, like they are not a farm animal. There's somebody who we bred them to farm them. But that's not who they are. I think are becoming more conscious now to not even within the human realm of labeling, not to say someone was a slave, but they were enslaved because that's not they never were a slave. That's not who they are. That's what somebody did to them unfairly. So I feel like making it a verb brings in the injustice and reminds us of something's being done to them, but it doesn't define them.
Elizabeth: [00:20:08] Yes, it's a powerful difference, and it's not a difference. I think many people think about it. But when you hear it, it's enormous. When does this happen? When do you bring this to the AP?
Carrie: [00:20:18] I think it's going to be early February or sometime in February that will be delivering this to them. I mean, I know they are going to need to, they can't just say, Oh yes, right away. I'm sure they need to have a board meeting or something. So it's not about hitting the AP over the head or it's not really a critique of them in general, but they're a leader. A thoughtful leader, an influencer in the media field. So I'm hoping that over the next year, they'll give it some consideration. I think they can update the way that other animals are discussed, especially since there's so much scientific research saying what I think should be obvious about the consciousness of other animals and how we've underestimated them greatly and the ecological crisis we've caused with mass extinction, we have got to start taking other species seriously.
Elizabeth: [00:21:14] One more question for regular everyday people who are not part of these groups or even for people who are not in the media or journalism. What can they do in the sense of like small changes in not only the way they represent animals or talk about animals, but in bringing them more into the conversation as something to consider?
Carrie: [00:21:39] We're all just participating in a culture that really isn't of our choice, we just grew up in this culture, but we can just start questioning things and just not be afraid to say that we love other animals, that they're astounding. You just have to be willing to say things that maybe other people haven't heard you say yet.
Elizabeth: [00:22:04] I love it.
Carrie: [00:22:05] When they hear you say it, they are like, “OK, I don't have to be a certain type of person to believe that”.
Elizabeth: [00:22:07] Thank you.
Carrie: [00:22:08] Thanks for doing this podcast.
Elizabeth: [00:22:19] To learn more about Carrie, about animals and media and the letter to the AP, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We'll have links to everything we are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe to Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show to support Species Unite, which we would greatly appreciate. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Cronuts and Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Poky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening and have a beautiful day.
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