A list of animals who

The recent death of the great Jane Goodall brought me back to an old post about the use of who-pronouns with non-human animals, as in ‘swallows who flew past her window’, as opposed to ‘swallows that/which flew past her window’.

Goodall’s first scientific paper was returned to her with who replaced by which, and he or she replaced by it, in reference to chimpanzees. Goodall promptly reinstated her choice of pronouns, presumably seeing them as markers of the animals’ intrinsic value, and their substitution as an unwarranted moral demotion.1

Since then I’ve made note of other examples of animals who that I’ve read in books.2 This post compiles them in one place, where they form a kind of homemade menagerie of zoolinguistic solidarity. It extends, as we have seen, to swallows:

She watched the sudden, fast shadows of swallows who flew past her window in fleeting pairs, subtracting light from her room, and marvelled how living things could suspend themselves in mid-air. (Claire Keegan, ‘Men and Women’, in Antarctica)

And, from the same writer, sheep:

I sit by the window and keep an eye on the sheep who stare, bewildered, from the car.

Ducks:

‘At the place [. . .] where timid ducks, who must have been through some experiences in the ugly little gravel pool of the never-completed excavation, flew away from me . . . (Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All)

Cows:

I do not care for animals, except for cows, who combine supreme usefulness with a rustic kind of beauty. (Maeve Kelly, ‘The Sentimentalist’, in Orange Horses)

Kingfishers and otters:

In now distant days Iris used to return to Steeple Aston or Hartley Road full of her visit to them, and of what they had told her about their Welsh cottage, a converted schoolhouse. They told her of the pool they had built in the field behind it, the kingfishers and otters who came to visit there. (John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch)

Rabbits:

Who was the more frightened between them? (Nicola Barker, Wide Open, when a woman is startled to meet a rabbit in a kitchen)

Tadpoles (first which, then who):

And we presented her with gallons of frogspawn which duly turned into tadpoles, which ate each other until there were just a few fat cannibal monsters left, all black belly and no sign of legs, who got poured down the sink. (Lorna Sage, Bad Blood)

Bonobos:

The researchers’ most spectacular success has been with Kanzi, a bonobo (a species closely related to chimpanzees) who apparently learned lexigrams spontaneously as an infant while watching his mother being trained. (Abby Kaplan, Women Talk More than Men: …And Other Myths about Language Explained)

Chimpanzees:

In the study by Hirata and Fuwa (2006), for example, chimpanzees who did not solicit other chimpanzees to engage in a group activity quite readily solicited a presumably more helpful human. (Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication)

I make piles, like the chimp who thought he was a human. (Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking)

Foxes:

And I look out for the fox, the fox who dropped me a rat. (Baume again)

Aardwolves and aasvogels (that’s right, aardwolves and aasvogels):

The aardvark is a peculiar African mammal whose equally peculiar double-A name has earned it its prestigious position as the first animal in the dictionary. Spare a thought, then, for its alphabetical next-door neighbours, the aardwolf and aasvogel, who are pipped into second and third place . . . (Paul Anthony Jones, Word Drops)

Horses:

But still they did not stop the mare, who cantered gaily onward. (Mary Lavin, ‘The Joy-Ride’, in In a Café)

It’s not just stallions who can become aggressive if they’re raised alone. (Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behaviour)

Pigs:

The sides of the pen are solid, so the other pigs can’t reach their snouts inside and bite the tail or rear end of the pig who’s eating. (Grandin and Johnson again)

Animals generally:

All animals who live in groups – and that is most mammals – form dominance hierarchies. (Grandin and Johnson)

Consider, he [Michael Trestman] says, the category of animals who have complex active bodies. These are animals who can move quickly, and who can seize and manipulate objects. (Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life)

If it is a number of animals who are being chased, and if the pack succeeds in surrounding them, then their mass flight turns into a panic, each of the hunted animals will try to escape on its own from the circle of its enemies. (Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, translated from the German by Carol Stewart)

Wolves:

Wolves vary their hunting techniques, share food with the old who so not hunt, and give gifts to each other. (Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men)

A wolf who remains with his or her parents and helps raise their next litter is an alloparent. (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy’s When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals)

(Many different animals are treated thus in Moussaieff Masson and McCarthy’s book, but I neglected to keep track, aside from the example above.)

Dogs, of course, are often so honoured – the most frequently so of all the animals in Gilquin and Jacobs’s data set (footnote 1):

They could care less that I once had a dog named Woodsprite who was crushed by a backhoe. (George Saunders, ‘The 400-Pound CEO’, in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline)

The same thing applied to the first three time dogs, two of whom had actually been the favourites. (James Kelman, ‘A wide runner’, in Not Not While the Giro)

Most senses require two of things – eyes, ears, hands. But we only have one nose. This is, again, to stop us smelling dogs so much, who stink. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena)

Molly Keane explicitly calls dogs people, in both The Rising Tide:

The only people to whom she was a little kind were her dogs and Diana.

and Loving and Giving:

The dogs loved him as he loved them. They flew to his beautiful whistle, even when on the hot line of a rabbit. Nettle, the Killer, a fierce opinionated person who would have been hero of a rat-pit had Silly Willie been sweeping chimneys, was, of the three, his favourite.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir, similarly, uses someone in reference to a dog in You:

Sinbad goes banana-boats when he sees you through the balcony door. [. . .] You kneel down on the rug and let him lick your nose with his smelly tongue. That’s how dogs kiss each other. Then you remember that they also lick each other’s bums, so you don’t let him do it any more. Still, at least someone’s glad to see you.

Even an ant can be ‘someone’:

Last week my little nephew said to his father: “Look, someone is walking under the table.” The father, thinking that his son had had a hallucination, looked under the table and saw – an ant! For the child, an ant was “someone.” I, too, have never doubted that I am one animal among others. (from ‘A Talk with Konrad Lorenz’, in In the Modern Idiom: An Introduction to Literature, ed. Leo Hamalian & Arthur Zeiger)

Rats:

The worst thing about rats, says Steve, ‘is waiting for that big wet slap on your back’. ‘No,’ says Kevin, ‘it’s knowing you’re being watched but not knowing who’s watching and from where.’ London’s sewer rats generally run away from humans. New York’s don’t. (Rose George, The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste)

If you thought rats were unexpected, try trees:

Mycorrhizal fungi have coevolved with trees, with whom they’ve worked out a mutually beneficial relationship in which they trade the products of their very different metabolisms. (Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma)

As soon as the bright sunlight increases the rate of photosynthesis and stimulates growth, the buds of those who have shot up receive more sugar. (The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, translated from the German by Jane Billinghurst)

And rivers: I’ve yet to read Robert Macfarlane’s book Is a River Alive?, but I saw an excerpt that referred to meeting ‘a living, threatened river who flows from the roadless boreal forest to the sea’. These non-human, non-animal examples align with a movement to grant living systems legal rights – chiefly to protect them from destructive human action.

The menagerie could be greatly enlarged by adding examples from other sources: conversations, letters and emails, social media, the internet generally, language corpora, etc. But this thin slice is based solely on offline reading because that’s how I often pattern my notes.

Using who or personal pronouns is not something I do automatically when referring to animals. Sometimes which, that, or it seems more apt, or I could go either way, depending on context. In footnote 2 I instinctively used which in reference to sharks and decided to leave it be.

I’m sure my usage is inconsistent – it’s one of those grey areas in language that I find interesting. Maybe it’s something you’ve noticed in your own usage. In any case, it’s fun to see new animals join the who club (or the very important person club). All it needs now is some fungi and microbes.

Updates:

Catching up on online reading after the Christmas break, I find that Language Hat has followed up on this post and added his own thoughts: “I’m pretty sure I’ve come to use who for non-humans more and more in recent decades, and I think it’s a good development. (Not sure about the fungi, though.)” The comments, too, are characteristically excellent.

Elmore Leonard’s Split Images has an unusual instance of it applied to an adult human. The speaker, as it happens, is a homicidal sociopath:

“It was a witness,” Robbie said. Will you get it in your goddamn head? Come on—I want you to shoot it, whoever it is”—slipping as he started off in the sand—”shoot it, goddamn it!”

*

1 I learned about this incident from Gaëtanelle Gilquin and George M. Jacobs’s paper ‘Elephants Who Marry Mice are Very Unusual: The Use of the Relative Pronoun Who with Nonhuman Animals’. It has lots of data-informed commentary and is well worth reading if this topic interests you.

2 Examples do occur in films and other media, naturally. There’s a fun one in Batman: The Movie (1966) when Batman, after being attacked by a shark, which then explodes, says at a press conference: ‘That was an unfortunate animal who chanced to swallow a floating mine.’ The DVD subtitles change the line, or I’d have included an image.

#anaphora #animals #birds #books #grammar #JaneGoodall #language #literature #nature #pronouns #relativePronouns #usage #which #who #writing

Annals of animals which get ‘who’

In a local newspaper some time ago I read about ‘dormice . . . who nest in shrubs and hedgerows’. The grammar of this phrase struck me enough to write a brief post on the different kinds of antecedent for which we use the relative pronouns who, that, and which.

When referring to animals we usually use that or which, reserving who for people, or entities that comprise people. But who may also be used for animate entities with personality or the implication thereof, and this includes non-human animals – even dormice, I was pleased to see.

As the table below shows, who is especially likely to be used with pets, companion animals, or domesticated or very familiar animals. If the creature has been personalized with a name or by establishing its sex, there’s a good chance it will warrant who.

I read a couple of nice examples recently in Claire Keegan’s short story ‘Men and Women’, from her debut collection Antarctica:

She watched the sudden, fast shadows of swallows who flew past her window in fleeting pairs, subtracting light from her room, and marvelled how living things could suspend themselves in mid-air.

I sit by the window and keep an eye on the sheep who stare, bewildered, from the car.

And two more in Luis Bunuel’s autobiography My Last Breath, translated by Abigail Israel:

At one time or another, we had monkeys, parakeets, falcons, frogs and toads, grass snakes, and a large African lizard who the cook killed with a poker in a moment of terror.

Luis also had a hatbox filled with tiny gray mice whom he allowed us to look at once a day

The second of these is from an article by Bunuel’s sister Conchita that was published in the French magazine Positif and reproduced in My Last Breath. Both pronoun choices can presumably be attributed to the translator. The inconsistency in selecting whom is a little curious too.

For a more thorough treatment of attitudes to the use of who with animals, see Gaëtanelle Gilquin and George M. Jacobs’ paper ‘Elephants Who Marry Mice are Very Unusual: The Use of the Relative Pronoun Who with Nonhuman Animals’. It opens with an interesting story about Jane Goodall’s research in Tanzania:

When Goodall submitted her first scientific paper for publication, it was returned to her by the editor to be amended. In every place where she had written (he) or (she) to refer to chimpanzees, the words had been replaced with (it). Similarly, every (who) had been replaced with (which). In an effort to rescue the chimpanzees from “thing-ness” and restore them to “being-ness,” Goodall stubbornly changed the words back.

Gilquin and Jacobs review dictionaries, grammars, style guides and the British National Corpus to examine attitudes towards the usage and to analyse its different motivations and contexts. This table is from their survey of the BNC and shows the degree of familiarity, intelligence, and perhaps other characteristics likely to earn an animal the privilege.

Update:

I’ve since come across many interesting examples of this broad phenomenon, including a dog being called a ‘person’, and who being applied to a tree, which may warrant another post on the topic.

Update to the update:

It took me 10 years, but here’s the post: ‘A list of animals who’.

#anaphora #animals #grammar #JaneGoodall #language #LuisBuñuel #nature #pronouns #relativePronouns #that #usage #which #who

And all this time the side doors unlocked

Romanticism 101
Dean Young

#Poetry #DeanYoung #Romanticism #Repetition #Anaphora #Texas #Rockabilly

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57049/romanticism-101

Word Search Puzzle 918

Word List : #preciso #proser #knarl #anaphora #lorius #darting #hortulan #awakens #babajaga #furor #dozent #frettier #dauted #abbey #tobymen #huffily #binous #ollav

http://karafinance.com/2024/02/28/word-search-puzzle-918/

We know this might have been a better prompt for Groundhog Day at the beginning of the month, but your fourth and final lycial challenge for FAWM 2024 is: ANAPHORA (or REPETITION).

Repeat a word or phrase at the start of successive lines (or song parts) for emphasis. Examples: "Ain't Got No" (Hair), "Ima Be" (Black Eyed Peas), "Suddenly I See" (KT Tunstall), "Add It Up" (Violent Femmes)

Happy fawming!

#fawm #fawm2024 #lyrics #lyricchallenge #anaphora #repetition