On the reference to birds at the Chicago Manual site, birds don’t really “talk.” Animals squawk or make noises at each other for breeding purposes and the like. They don’t communicate with people. Birds are not people. They are things in formally written English language.
Linguistic activism for social pathologies pushed in recent decades won’t get much further anyway. It will end and be discarded after the conclusion of the debt paradigm. What passes for journalism now will pass away, too.
Now you’re just getting silly. Because animals aren’t people they aren’t to be acknowledged for their sex, sentience or relationships to other elements of the world?
Plant, animal or mineral? I believe I know what humans are—though as I see here, a sometimes irrational one.
As bad as those who feel a need to anthropomorphize animals are those who thrust themselves into the illogical in order to deny the similarities that are there.