Since these pets get as much care as infants Why cant they learn to speak the laguage of their people?
Smaller brains, and mouths not suited to making the range of sounds that people make – but smaller brains, mostly.
They are physically incapable of speech, nor are their brains wired to understand it as people do. They may learn to recognize certain words, but they tune into tone more than they do the actual speech.
Animals certainly can communicate, but they do it in other ways than speech. Our pets are extremely attuned to human body language, so much so that it’s actually easier to train a pet using hand signals than it is by using words as commands. They learn to judge our moods and tailor their behavior accordingly.
No vocal cords.
Plus, (based on what I’ve learned watching PBS), most animals engage in non-verbal communication, and probably “talk” to us a lot more than we realize.
:dubious:
Either I’m being whooshed here, or you’ve never lived next to a neighbor who owned a barking dog or a cat in heat…
The human language is a specific behavior pattern that’s hard-wired into our brains. It’s something we’re born with; we just need to pick up the missing details, i.e. the lexicon and variations in grammar. And we’re even hard-wired to seek out and find those missing details.
Yeah, that isn’t right. :smack:
I think it’s the voice box that animals lack - which means they are unable to meaningfully change the tenor, frequency, pitch, whatever, of their voices.
My girlfriend gave me this little book, the kind you get in the checkout line at the supermarket, called How to Talk to Your Cat. It’s a little looney, in that it suggests that cats have ESP, but it’s very good at tuning you in to a cat’s non-verbal cues.
One part talks about the different positions of a cat’s tail and what they mean. For example, cats don’t wag their tails bcause they’re happy (like dogs do). It usually means that they’re trying to make a decision. The example in the book talks about how a cat might be crying to go outside. You open the door for them and they see that it’s raining. They will sit there for a minute and wag their tail back and forth while they mull whether they want to go outside badly enough to get wet.
I’m with Lissa .
Pets can learn certain words, and develop a vocabulary. My cats have three version of “no” they recognise:
- She said “no”
- She said “no” louder.
- She’s getting up and saying “no!” Run!
Hmmm… sounds like my 6-year-old.
There’s an anecdote in Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation where she debunks friends’ theory that their cat has ESP. Supposedly it always knew when the wife was arriving home to their highrise apartment from work. Grandin figured out that the cat only reliably knew when there was an elevator operator that the friend would speak to on the way up. Cat’s aren’t psychic, they just have much better hearing than people do. Interesting book.