DeMello defines othering as “making people – or animals – different in order to justify treating them differently” (258), essentializing as “the treatment of individuals as if they were the same as others in their race/sex/species” (259), and deindividualizing, as the process wherein the creature in question is seen as a nameless, faceless, member of a replaceable group (181), as in branded livestock, numbered lab animals, or even tattooed prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
In human history these tactics have been employed to facilitate everything from witch hunts and colonization to war and genocide. Fairly recent historical examples of the kind of genocide permitted by the othering, essentializing, and deindividualizing of human beings would be in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. There, there “were scenarios of large-scale violence … substantiated by the manipulation of public and private discourses that denied diversity.” Eventually, “both countries adopted policies that undermine[d] basic rights and ignore[d] sections of society” which resulted in violence and mass killings. (Kroetz).
The mechanisms also explain the hubris of the 1904 World’s Fair with its ‘human zoo’ component. David Francis, the chief executive of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Corporation, said the motivation for the fair “was to demonstrate to visitors that human history had reached its “apotheosis” in Forest Park” (Johnson). An apotheosis which involved the display of Japanese, Philippino, Native American and African human beings as if they were specimens not people.
When applied to animals, these mechanisms are used to justify literally any and every behavior which people have deemed beneficial to themselves, up to, and including, eating and experimenting on animals. Rene Descartes, for example, was so certain of his belief that dogs were so different to people they could not feel pain that he had no issue with their screams as he dissected them alive (DeMello 380).
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