Dehumanization involves humans being actively stripped of their status as sentient beings. Stripped of their individuality, their desires, their needs, their agency. It is the act of reducing someone to a “something”. This way, people are made to lose their autonomy, their agency, and to no longer be recognized as someone.
For animals, a similar process occurs. Legally and socially speaking, animals are de facto “things.” They do not experience a “loss” of autonomy or agency; those were never granted in the first place. Animals are not recognized as someone.
Thus, the process of rendering the other “a thing,” and believing oneself to be superior to said “thing”, is the same for humans and animals alike. It is the same mechanism that enables oppression: by depriving the other of their individuality, which makes them who they are, the door is opened to supremacy and domination.
However, the fact that the process of “dehumanization” doesn’t have a counterpart in our language for the same process of “dehumanizing” animals shows how entrenched speciesism is in our society. Speciesism is so deeply embedded in our legal, social, and cultural systems that even our language fails to acknowledge the oppression of these sentient beings in full.
Just imagine your oppression being so normalized and legitimized that there is not even a word for the process that leads to your oppression.
Stop “de-sentiencing” individuals, whether human or animal.
We are all someone.