To the faithful declassed: health risk as speciesist camouflage

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze the construction of speciesist representations in graphic press speaking about homeless dogs. We will take as a starting point the hypothesis that these representations construct the concept of "homeless animal" as a sanitary risk for the human species and, therefore, nonhuman animals are described as the enemy and their resemblance is not the resemblance of a live being. We will analyze three texts, extracted from the digital versions of three different newspapers, published in different countries and written in different languages. We will adopt Social Semiotics by Hodge and Kress [1988] as the main theoretical framework