Innocent Animals, Unfair Idioms

Humans are undoubtedly one of the most selfish, self-serving species. We don’t leave any chance to exploit everything around us – people, animals, emotionally, mentally, and physically as well.

In fact, it doesn’t stop there and we exploit the animals to use in our languages as well.

Let’s take an example of the word Bitch. It’s a feminine name for Dog. It’s just like any common name, but when we use it, it implies saying something nasty about someone.

No fault of that poor ‘bitch’ – dog species.

Dogs are the most used species in proverbial language. Barking dogs don’t bite. Elephants walk, and dogs bark. All bark and no bite, and so many.

Dogs, despite being loyal to their masters and intelligent, are always portrayed in a bad light in metaphorical language.

Then there are donkeys. ‘Donkey work’. Yes, they are hard-working species, they do it without cribbing, and human beings using them since the donkey’s years [here it’s used in good spirit].

But then the oxen, and bulls too used in getting the hard work done. Then why only poor donkeys are pushed to frame that proverb?

The phrase “moving at a snail’s pace’, unnecessarily criticizes the snail. Okay, it is slow, God created it in that way, so why bring the creature and put it in poor light for our convenience?

Another one is “Bull in a China shop”. By its nature and physique, a bull is a bulky animal. Even if it moves around, there are chances of getting things messed up. But seldom does it intentionally, we are free to use the above proverb, not even thinking about these poor, innocent animals.

“Cry wolf”, another one. Every animal has its own way of communication, so why do we consider crying a wolf as lying? No connection, but still we don’t stop it.

Ironically, many of these metaphors, and proverbs, fit better with human beings than the animals they refer. But just for our convenience, we tried using these animals in our language.

This is not the case for any single language, I think. Almost every language must have some or other proverb giving a reference to an animal for their own flaws.

No doubt, words are innovated and are put by human beings, so any language won’t be an exception to this.

Thankfully, animals don’t understand this.  I thank God, for this one, because we already put them through hardships and if they had known, how we were using their names in an insulting way, they definitely would have been heartbroken beyond means.

But we came so far, that it’s difficult to change it at this moment. All this is ingrained in our culture, and it’s difficult to correct or alter this proverbial language.

With due respect to dog species, I would like to use this proverb here – ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ Here old dogs represent us, human beings.