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I've noticed there's a verb fressen in German whose meanings include "to eat" but it has an animal sense, i.e. ich esse, but Mein Hund fresse. Which leads me to ask these questions:

  1. Are there any examples in English? Not just words to do with eating but in general, where you'd use a verb/noun/etc for animals but not humans, or even a pair of words where one is used for humans not animals and the other is used for animals not humans? To my knowledge, graze describes a method of consumption; it's not a straightforward case that cattle (for example) "graze" whereas people "eat".
  2. Is there a name for such a class of words used in cases where animals are in question?
  3. Is there a word to describe the use (intentional or otherwise) of an "animal" word to describe a person or their actions, characteristics, etc?
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  • In animal breeding, the formal terms for an animal's parents are sire and dam, though you probably wouldn't use them of your pet dog's father and mother (if you happened to know them). Actually, graze is sometimes used of people to refer to the habit of eating frequent snacks instead of sitting down to a proper meal.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Apr 3 at 13:14
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    There are also a lot of verbs for animals reproducing such as to sire, whelp, litter, pup, calve, spawn..., which I don't think would be used of people except in an insulting way. There are also verbs of motion such as gallop and gambol, which are rarely used of people, but might be metaphorically or humorously.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Apr 3 at 13:44
  • @StuartF Almost anything can be used metaphorically or humorously, so those cases probably shouldn't exclude an answer.
    – Barmar
    Commented Apr 3 at 21:13
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    Questions asking for lists like this are usually not a good fit for SE sites, because it's nearly impossible to post a complete answer. And you should just ask one question at a time, because otherwise you can get different answers for each sub-question, and there's no way to decide which one to accept.
    – Barmar
    Commented Apr 3 at 21:14
  • Actually there is a direct translation to English of your first example. A person eats (isst), an animal feeds (frisst). Also compare the nouns: a person is given food, an animal is given feed.
    – MetaEd
    Commented Apr 3 at 22:35

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Grazing is a specific type of eating that humans don't typically do, although it could be used humorously to describe certain individuals. "Grazing" involves a constant but gradual methodical all day style of eating off the ground or up in trees, for example ground plants, and the such.

Many specific verbs for non-human animals have much more common counterparts that can be used on all animals including humans, "litters" or "pups" are "children", "spawn" is to "give birth", etc…

"hibernation" humans do not do, although there is "Seasonal Affective Disorder".

Humans "feeding themselves" could be said to be a non-human animals equivalent of "feeding", but this is highly open to interpretation as many uses of this sort of terminology can work.

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  • Actually, it's Seasonal Affective Disorder - and not a direct counterpart to hibernation.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Jun 18 at 8:59
  • I didn't say it was a direct counterpart, it's clearly very different.
    – alan2here
    Commented Jun 18 at 9:08

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