Stan Carey at Sentence first posted A list of animals who:
The recent death of the great Jane Goodall brought me back to an old post about the use of who-pronouns with non-human animals, as in ‘swallows who flew past her window’, as opposed to ‘swallows that/which flew past her window’.
Goodall’s first scientific paper was returned to her with who replaced by which, and he or she replaced by it, in reference to chimpanzees. Goodall promptly reinstated her choice of pronouns, presumably seeing them as markers of the animals’ intrinsic value, and their substitution as an unwarranted moral demotion.¹ [¹ I learned about this incident from Gaëtanelle Gilquin and George M. Jacobs’s paper ‘Elephants Who Marry Mice are Very Unusual: The Use of the Relative Pronoun Who with Nonhuman Animals’. It has lots of data-informed commentary and is well worth reading if this topic interests you.]
Since then I’ve made note of other examples of animals who that I’ve read in books. This post compiles them in one place, where they form a kind of homemade menagerie of zoolinguistic solidarity.
There are sheep, ducks, cows, and many more, ending with ants, rats, and even trees (“As soon as the bright sunlight increases the rate of photosynthesis and stimulates growth, the buds of those who have shot up receive more sugar”). He ends with:
I’m sure my usage is inconsistent – it’s one of those grey areas in language that I find interesting. Maybe it’s something you’ve noticed in your own usage. In any case, it’s fun to see new animals join the who club (or the very important person club). All it needs now is some fungi and microbes.
Interesting stuff; I’m pretty sure I’ve come to use who for non-humans more and more in recent decades, and I think it’s a good development. (Not sure about the fungi, though.)
Early adopter: Dr. Seuss, in Horton Hears a Who?
Stan Carey refers to an earlier post of his which observes that _who_ “may also be used for animate entities with personality or the implication thereof, and this [sometimes] includes non-human animals.” That seems exactly right, and speakers/writers will obviously vary from each other (and maybe vary from themselves on prior and subsequent occasions …) as to whether they do or don’t wish to imply some personality in the case of a given animal in a given situation.
I just used the magic of Control-F to investigate Tolkien’s use of relative “who” in _The Hobbit_, and in addition to the more hominin-like non-humans like hobbits and dwarves et cetera (and also deprecated critters like goblins and trolls) he uses it with eagles, spiders, and dragons, or rather with specified individual examples of each of those.