There are plenty of languages in which the name of a meat product isn't an indirection. Do those speakers treat animals any better? IIRC stronger forms of Sapir-Wolf are more or less discredited nowadays. Even in English, we're happy to refer to "chicken," "turkey," and "fish." They're not treated particularly well.
Supposedly the demarcation line in English has to do with class and our Norman overlords in 1100. Rich folk ate in French, and that's why we get terms like pork (porc), beef (boeuf), veal (veau), and mutton (mouton). Poor peasants stuck with their poor peasant words when eating their poor peasant foods, so those foods retained the reference to the source when moved from field to table.
I don't know how true it is--if it were that uncomplicated, why do we have pollo and gallina?
And regarding "discredited", it seems (http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sapir%E...) that various strong forms of the hypothesis don't hold but there is support for a weak form (that linguistic differences have some effect on cognition).
There are plenty of languages in which the name of a meat product isn't an indirection. Do those speakers treat animals any better? IIRC stronger forms of Sapir-Wolf are more or less discredited nowadays. Even in English, we're happy to refer to "chicken," "turkey," and "fish." They're not treated particularly well.
Supposedly the demarcation line in English has to do with class and our Norman overlords in 1100. Rich folk ate in French, and that's why we get terms like pork (porc), beef (boeuf), veal (veau), and mutton (mouton). Poor peasants stuck with their poor peasant words when eating their poor peasant foods, so those foods retained the reference to the source when moved from field to table.
I don't know how true it is--if it were that uncomplicated, why do we have pollo and gallina?