Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approah that focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced and reinforces in text and talk by the transport of ideological assumptions. In this paper this approach is applied to the power relationships between humans and animals. In this case the ideological assumptions can be attributed to anthropocentrism and speciesism, which will be critiziced from an ecological and pathocentrical point of view. The analysis of different texts has shown that there are formal and linguistic distancing mechanisms (objectivization, instrumentalization, anonymization, euphemisms and derogation) which are supposed to help reproducing these ideological assumptions by creating cognitive and emotional distance to certain animals. The human attitudes towards animals are multifaceted and partially ambivalent. This can be seen in the way animals are attached to socially constructed categories. The category is often crucial for the fate of an individual animal - particularly the categories "edible" and "non-edible".