animalism

Noun

animalism (countable and uncountable, plural animalisms)

1. The doctrine that humans are merely animals, and lack any spirituality.
   • Animalism understands the human person and the human animal to be identical. The major appeal of animalism is that it avoids the spatially coincident thinkers discussed earlier.2014, Neil A. Manson, Robert W. Barnard, The Bloomsbury Companion to Metaphysics, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 237
2. Animal-like behaviour or appetite; brutality.
   • The wife is what her husband makes her, and his rude animalism had made her the nervous invalid she was.1874, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, IV.6
   • Halpin [Frayser]’s death and the post-mortem demoniacalness of the well-bred Southern woman, lops off the grafted branches of the human and cuts it down to that stump of itself which is primordial, persistent, unconscious animalism.1918, The Stratford Monthly: An International Magazine, Boston, Mass.: Stratford Company, →OCLC, page 44
3. In a positive sense: natural animal activity; physicality, natural energy.
4. Animal liberation; animal rights advocacy.
   • For this reason, if before the 1990s animalism was politically nonexistent, much changed after the publication of Animal Liberation.2018, Andrew Linzey, Clair Linzey, The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics, page 111
   • Her organization's website perfectly illustrates the conflation of a religious ethos and animalism: it calls for the protection of cows for ecological reasons while referring to Hindu cosmology (People for Animals 2013).2019, Michelle T. King, Culinary Nationalism in Asia