The Words We Inherit: How Language Shapes Animal Health, Public Health, and Who Gets Blamed

When people talk about animal wellbeing in Indigenous communities, the conversation often reveals something deeper than opinion. It reveals the language we inherited. Words can appear neutral, but they quietly shape how responsibility, care, and blame are assigned. They influence whether an issue is understood as a public health challenge or as someone’s personal moral failure. They determine whose worldview becomes the standard, and whose is treated as the exception.

We see this when community dogs are referred to as “strays,” even when those dogs have relationships with multiple households and move comfortably through the community. The word “stray” frames them as abandoned or uncared for. It erases local patterns of caregiving and mobility and implies a deficit where there may not be one. This does not mean that abandonment or neglect never occur. It means that when those realities are immediately framed as moral failure rather than as consequences of limited veterinary access or disrupted community norms, the response focuses on blame instead of prevention. In some cases, this framing also appears in internal governance discussions, where animals are treated as a distraction from “real” administrative responsibilities and language like “rounding them up” or “removing the problem” becomes a way to resolve complaints without addressing the underlying lack of services, planning, or support.

The same pattern appears with the word “owned.” Ownership is not a universal way of describing human animal relations. In many Indigenous communities, animals may be cared for collectively, move between families, or be understood as part of the community rather than as property. When people insist on labeling every dog as “owned” or “not owned,” they impose a legal and cultural framework that often does not match how life actually works in those communities.

Even the word “pet” carries assumptions. In dominant urban culture, a pet is framed primarily as an object of individual ownership, affection, and managed dependency, defined by attachment to a single household. That framing treats animals as belonging only within the private space of the home, rather than as beings with social, ecological, or community roles beyond it. It also presumes access to a formal service network of veterinarians, trainers, groomers, and kennels.

When that infrastructure is not accessible, animals who do not fit the pet ideal are judged as improperly cared for rather than understood in light of the conditions people are navigating. In practice, a dog who does not conform to this narrow definition of “pet” is often reclassified as a “stray,” even when relationships and care are present. As we wrote in our Healthy Debate article, judgment often follows, with questions about why communities “allow” situations that would never arise in towns with twenty four hour veterinary access and animal control departments. The criticism rests on a narrow definition of care shaped by unequal access to infrastructure.

Pronouns matter too. Referring to a dog as “it” may seem insignificant, but it quietly turns a living being into an object. Once an animal is treated as a thing, it becomes easier to talk about “dealing with the problem” rather than asking why the problem exists in the first place. Language like this strips away relationships, behaviour, and context, making harm feel distant and responsibility easier to avoid.

In contrast, using “he,” “she,” or “they” reflects an understanding that animals are beings with roles and relationships in the community. How animals are referred to shapes whether harm is treated as inevitable or as something shaped by conditions like access to services, planning, and support.

These patterns in animal language mirror broader patterns in how Indigenous communities are often described. Problems shaped by history and policy are frequently framed as personal or cultural failings, rather than as the predictable result of systems that were never built or were actively denied.

When communities are positioned as needing correction, instruction, or intervention, attention shifts away from the absence of services, infrastructure, and jurisdictional support that municipalities take for granted. Language like this does not merely describe a problem. It quietly determines who is expected to change, and who is relieved of responsibility for building systems that actually work.

The word “rescue” also deserves careful attention. In some contexts, it accurately describes intervening to prevent immediate harm, such as helping an injured animal to safety when that animal would not otherwise survive. In those cases, rescue describes an action, not a judgment. In other contexts, particularly when used to describe removing a dog from a family or community and rehoming that dog elsewhere, the word carries different implications. It can suggest that harm was coming from the people themselves, rather than from the absence of veterinary care, housing stability, or animal management infrastructure. Framed this way, rescue language centres virtue outside the community and turns infrastructure driven challenges into moral stories about who failed and who stepped in to fix it. Rescue is not inherently wrong, but when used uncritically, it can obscure the systems that created the need for intervention.

Terms like “northern dogs” are often used as shorthand for dogs from Indigenous communities, even though Indigenous Nations live across every region of the country. The phrase functions as a kind of dog whistle, flattening distinct geographies, cultures, and governance systems into a single coded category. In doing so, it makes structural gaps sound like matters of place rather than policy.

“Free roaming dogs” is another example. While often used as a synonym for danger or neglect, roaming describes a pattern of movement, not a measure of care. With the right supports in place, healthy and safe free roaming dog populations can and do exist. In some communities, animal agency and shared space are understood as values rather than failures.

Terms like “rez dogs” operate differently from other animal descriptors because they function as identity-linked language rather than neutral description. Like many such terms, “rez dog” is understood differently depending on who is using it, in what context, and to what end. In public discourse, particularly when used by people outside the communities being described, the term can signal a story about neglect, danger, or disorder before any facts are presented. It becomes less about the dogs themselves and more about cueing an audience to draw conclusions about the people and places they come from.

This distinction matters because language that may be relational, reclaimed, or contextually grounded within a community can become stigmatizing when removed from its social and historical setting. When words do this work quietly, they allow judgment to travel without having to announce itself.

When language normalizes these assumptions, it becomes easy for both outsiders and decision makers to frame public health gaps as personal failings and for coded narratives to spread unchallenged. Sensational stories that frame dogs as dangerous or communities as unsafe rest on a foundation laid much earlier, where certain words have already prepared the audience to judge.

Language cannot fix systemic problems, but it can illuminate them. It can help people see that animal health challenges in remote and rural communities are not reflections of care or character. They reflect who has access to services, which communities were permitted and supported to build systems, and which were prevented from doing so under federal policy, despite the federal government’s fiduciary obligations. When we look closely at the words we inherit, we begin to see the systems beneath them.