In Chinese, the word for animal is dong wu, meaning 'moving thing'

It was the sheer nonchalance of it, the way people scaled fish as though they were simply peeling potatoes, skinned live rabbits while smoking a cigarette, joking with a friend as the blood drained from the throat of a bewildered duck. They didn't kill animals before they cooked and ate them. They simply went about the process of preparing a creature for the pot and table, and at some random point it died. But there, perhaps, is the crux of the matter, embedded almost invisibly in those two sentences. In English, as in most European languages, the words for the living things we eat are mostly derived from the Latin anima, which means air, breath, life. 'Creature', from the Latin for 'created', seems to connect animals with us human beings in some divinely fashioned universe. We too are creatures, animated. In Chinese, the word for animal is dong wu, meaning 'moving thing'. Is it cruel to hurt something that (unless you are a fervent Buddhist) you see as simply a 'moving thing', scarcely even alive.

F. Dunlop, Shark's fin soup and Sichuan pepper (2008), 49