The article draws on visual rhetoric as a research perspective focusing on images as tools of persuasion and offers a multi-layered analysis of selected posters awarded in the competition entitled “Zwierzę też człowiek” ("Animals are Humans Too”) organised by the advertising agency AMS. The analysed posters, displayed in 2020 in the showcases of bus shelters in Poland, constituted a social marketing campaign on the rights of animals to a dignified life. The analysis encompasses the linguistic layer, the visual component(s) and the interdependencies between the verbal and visual mode, as well as intertextual (visual and verbal) references to existing cultural texts employed to elicit emotional responses and sensitize the viewers to the issue of animal rights. The author also discusses the extent to which the analysed campaign under the meaningful title “Zwierzę też człowiek” (“Animals are Humans Too”) represents the anthropocentric mentality: Does it weaken and/or abandon the anthropocentric perspective or does it employ anthropocentrism to evoke empathy and facilitate the perception of non-human persons as part of an interspecies community?The article draws on visual rhetoric as a research perspective focusing on images as tools of persuasion and offers a multi-layered analysis of selected posters awarded in the competition entitled “Zwierzę też człowiek” ("Animals are Humans Too”) organised by the advertising agency AMS. The analysed posters, displayed in 2020 in the showcases of bus shelters in Poland, constituted a social marketing campaign on the rights of animals to a dignified life. The analysis encompasses the linguistic layer, the visual component(s) and the interdependencies between the verbal and visual mode, as well as intertextual (visual and verbal) references to existing cultural texts employed to elicit emotional responses and sensitize the viewers to the issue of animal rights. The author also discusses the extent to which the analysed campaign under the meaningful title “Zwierzę też człowiek” (“Animals are Humans Too”) represents the anthropocentric mentality: Does it weaken and/or abandon the anthropocentric perspective or does it employ anthropocentrism to evoke empathy and facilitate the perception of non-human persons as part of an interspecies community
