Languages tend to exhibit different treatments of the entities of the extralinguistic world, with phrases that denote human beings (or more generally animates) at the top and phrases that denote inanimates at the bottom. This ranking is known as the Animacy Hierarchy. Croft (2003: 128) terms it one of the 'best known grammatical hierarchies', and the notion is so crucially important that it has made its way into the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (Matthews 2007) or the Oxford English Dictionary (2017). 'Animacy' is not to be understood just in its everyday sense, as 'endowed with life, living, alive' (OED 2017); the Animacy Hierarchy further isolates a 'human' category, reflecting an anthropocentric filter on conceptualisation. This is obvious, for instance, in the gender system of standard English. First, while humans (especially adults) are referred to as he or she when their sex is known, a statistical analysis shows that animals have a nearly 20% chance of being referred to as it when the antecedent noun phrase specifies their sex, regardless of whether the anaphor is far from the antecedent or in the same clause (Gardelle 2013). This is evidence of a filter for humans alone. Secondly, the issue of sexism in the use of purportedly sex-neutral he only targets references to humans, not animals: he for the average American or with the antecedent 'your child' in non-specific contexts is viewed as problematic, but it does not come under any criticism when used for the non-specific raccoon (e.g. you cannot have a meaningful conversation with a raccoon, although he may occasionally nod 1 ) (Gardelle 2015, Chevalier et al. 2017. The implicatures of this human-based filter are well summed up by Yamamoto (1999: 1): 'The concept of 'animacy' can be regarded as some kind of assumed cognitive scale extending from human through animal to inanimate.' 1 'How to outsmart a raccoon Okay, let's start from the beginning on this one. Everyone says raccoons are smart, but that isn't true. With the possible exception of Uncle Bob, every human being you've ever met is smarter than the smartest raccoon that's ever been. A raccoon can't count to ten, at least not out loud, and you can't have a meaningful conversation with a raccoon, although he may occasionally nod in a way that implies he understands and agrees with your position on protectionism and its effect on international trade. Raccoons are focused and persistent […]' (Smith 2010: 200)