Proposal
Add speciesist language as a new category in the Inclusive Naming Initiative's terminology recommendations, alongside the existing racial, gender, and ableist language categories.
Background
The INI has successfully driven the adoption of inclusive terminology across the cloud-native ecosystem, most notably the master/slave → primary/replica transition. The INI's framework and methodology are well-established and could naturally extend to speciesist language.
Speciesist Terms in Technical Infrastructure
Several widely-used technical terms have animal exploitation origins:
| Current Term |
Proposed Alternative |
Context |
| "cattle vs. pets" |
"ephemeral vs. persistent" / "fungible vs. unique" |
Infrastructure management metaphor |
| "canary deployment" |
"progressive rollout" / "incremental deployment" |
Deployment strategy |
| "stack canary" |
"sentinel value" / "guard value" |
Security mechanism |
| "monkey patch" |
"runtime patch" / "dynamic patch" |
Code modification technique |
| "dogfooding" |
"self-hosting" / "self-testing" |
Internal product usage |
The "cattle vs. pets" metaphor is particularly relevant — it explicitly frames sentient beings as disposable commodities, and its alternatives ("ephemeral vs. persistent") are both more precise and already align with Kubernetes terminology (ephemeral containers, persistent volumes).
Academic Foundation
Peer-reviewed research has established speciesist bias in language and AI as a measurable phenomenon:
- Hagendorff, Bossert, Tse & Singer (2023). "Speciesist bias in AI." AI and Ethics. DOI: 10.1007/s43681-023-00380-w
- Leach et al. (2023). "Speciesism in everyday language." British Journal of Social Psychology.
- Takeshita et al. (2022). "Speciesist language and nonhuman animal bias in English masked language models." Information Processing & Management.
Why the INI
The INI's existing methodology for evaluating terminology — assessing harm, identifying alternatives, building consensus — is directly applicable to speciesist language. The INI's influence across CNCF, Linux Foundation, and the broader open-source ecosystem means that adding this category would have the greatest possible impact on adoption.
The INI already successfully argued that technical precision is a key benefit of inclusive terminology. The same applies here: "ephemeral vs. persistent" is genuinely more descriptive than "cattle vs. pets."
Proposed Next Steps
- Add speciesist language to the INI's terminology evaluation pipeline
- Start with the highest-confidence terms ("cattle vs. pets") where technical alternatives are clearly superior
- Publish recommendations alongside existing INI guidance
We'd welcome the opportunity to contribute research, terminology proposals, and implementation support.
Proposal
Add speciesist language as a new category in the Inclusive Naming Initiative's terminology recommendations, alongside the existing racial, gender, and ableist language categories.
Background
The INI has successfully driven the adoption of inclusive terminology across the cloud-native ecosystem, most notably the master/slave → primary/replica transition. The INI's framework and methodology are well-established and could naturally extend to speciesist language.
Speciesist Terms in Technical Infrastructure
Several widely-used technical terms have animal exploitation origins:
The "cattle vs. pets" metaphor is particularly relevant — it explicitly frames sentient beings as disposable commodities, and its alternatives ("ephemeral vs. persistent") are both more precise and already align with Kubernetes terminology (ephemeral containers, persistent volumes).
Academic Foundation
Peer-reviewed research has established speciesist bias in language and AI as a measurable phenomenon:
Why the INI
The INI's existing methodology for evaluating terminology — assessing harm, identifying alternatives, building consensus — is directly applicable to speciesist language. The INI's influence across CNCF, Linux Foundation, and the broader open-source ecosystem means that adding this category would have the greatest possible impact on adoption.
The INI already successfully argued that technical precision is a key benefit of inclusive terminology. The same applies here: "ephemeral vs. persistent" is genuinely more descriptive than "cattle vs. pets."
Proposed Next Steps
We'd welcome the opportunity to contribute research, terminology proposals, and implementation support.