1. To bring out someone’s brutal or instinctive nature: Sometimes being active in war for a few years in a country can animalize a soldier later on when he or she is home again, and there are some who become quite cruel and ruthless towards others.
2. To make coarse and brutal; dehumanize: Hostilities in fighting can animalize people by degrading them, demeaning them, or putting them down.
3. To endow a deity, or god, with the attributes of a creature that is non-human: Jane read a story where a divine being was animalized into the form of a horse and later appeared again as a humanoid or a person.