Sustainability efforts are a reaction to the realization that human activity is out of balance with the rest of the natural world. A core driver of attitudes that lead to unsustainable and ecologically destructive behaviour is human-nature dualism: The notion that humans are separate from nature. A component of human-nature dualism is human-animal dualism, in which humans are thought of as apart from or superior to other species. These notions are reflected and encoded in widespread language practices. However, there are alternatives. This paper describes findings from an animal welfare discourse corpus that shows how pronoun choices in the English language can resist and reject the destructive thinking of human-animal dualism. In the corpus, there is a statistically significant and very clear preference to use gendered pronouns, singular THEY, or “he or she” types of constructions rather than IT in reference to individual, arbitrary or generic nonhuman animals. The pronoun choices exemplified in the corpus indicate a direction humans can take in which we use language in ways that encourage unity and balance with the rest of the natural world, not dualism and destruction.
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