Might be a bad example. It’s been shown that *dogs *especially are very sensitive to human moods - they even experience contagious yawning.
Other animals I’ll grant you are much less likely to care, but we haven’t been breeding them specifically to be companion animals for as long, so there’s no point for them to have human-specific empathetic traits.
Regardless, even if doggy feels sad because you’re blue, it hasn’t got the mental chops to have a *conversation *about the hows and whys of your sadness, or to attempt to make you feel better in any way more complicated than a 2 year old might make (you want a kiss? Kisses make everything better!).
Granted. I suppose I wasn’t saying these things aren’t apparently the case, but to make the leap of logic from there to the possibility that, “someday this means we’ll be able to talk about the weather, and discuss quantum mechanics!” is quite naive; no matter how many time one says, “nothing is absolute.”
It works both ways, much to the chagrin of one of my friends who will not only yawn but will nod off to sleep when people or animals near him start yawning.
I’ve got a four-year-old and a two-year-old. Not even looking at words, grammar and syntax, the difference in the understanding of the world is just amazing. This morning, she asked me why we bough bread last night instead of making it like we normally do.
In The Language Instinct Steven Pinker makes the point that for all the animals used in language training experiments, it’s all about them. “Play with me.” “Give me a treat.”
For even my two-year-old, certain things in the world fascinate him. He loves trucks, both play toys and real ones.
ld: Do you ever wish you could communicate with animals?
Me: yes, I do!
ld: Why?
Me: I’d like to know what they’re saying. Like, those birds- what could they be saying right now? dramatic bird voice “I can’t find any worms! It’s kinda chilly out here!”
ld: mom. Not everything would be an announcement.
I’ve owned beloved pets, and heard countless such stories, such as John DiFool’s, and seen several shows, documentaries and articles on communicating with animals as well.
For all of these anecdotes, studies and what have you, if say, dogs, were able to grasp thousands of words, their meanings, and perhaps even put them together in ways we might not be aware of, then why do other simple forms of communication and correlation seem to go totally beyond their heads.
You can talk about your dog, with another person, while it sits in that room about it and it won’t seem to pick up on anything you might be saying about it, for better or worse.
I’m sure my pet dog, over the course of its life, was in minor pain at some point—if not several—and it never seemed to communicate anything of the sort to me. Yet, it never put 1+1 together any number of times I may have expressed pain or a headache, as I also asked or sought out and popped some Tylenol?
There must be a million different scenarios like this, where if the animal was really piecing the human world together, it would begin to display surprising behavior along such lines.
I don’t know of any animals that seem to make these sorts of very simple correlations (other than a random, biased anecdote here and there) that’s even assuming they are able to pick up words and their meanings, even just in passing.
I’ve had interactions with my dogs that could be called a conversation. She barks a certain bark, and I say “Wanna go outside?” She then barks the "No, bad guess, try again! " bark, and I say “So—do you need water?” If I’m right, she barks the “Yes! Good human!” bark and runs to her water bowl. If I’m wrong, I get the same “Bad guess, try again!” bark.
It’s not a very intellectual conversation, but we are exchanging information through verbal means.
Along the same lines, one of our cats - the noticibly smarter of the two - has very specific meows to communicate specific needs: “I’m bored; somebody wiggle a string for me!” is very different from “I’m hungry; where’s my damn dinner?” He even has a specific moaning sound that means “Mayday! Alert! Impending hairball! Ooohhhh, I don’t feel so good… blort”
(Our other cat makes one single beeping sort of noise. But then, she rode the short bus to school…)
Maybe the reason many posters above opine that conversations with animals would be really boring is because pets lead very boring simplified lives. Ask somebody who does something complex and challenging with their (probably) dog, you might get a different view. Dogs can and do communicate such things as:
“I found the person you asked me to find, but he’s dead. Come with me, I’ll show you.”
“I know you think I brought all the sheep, but there’s more down in the creek.”
“Keep an eye on the guy with the hat, he’s in a real bad mood. The guy you think is the perp is just scared, I’m not real worried about him.”
The question becomes, Ulfreida, are those examples of communicating or examples of stimulus-response? In the first instance, for example, does the dog know that the person is dead and that the dog is showing the human where it is, or does it simply know that when it finds the Big-Thing that smells like the Small-Thing and shows it to Food-Giver/Ear-Scratcher that it gets a treat?
Koko and other animals that were taught to sign, for some reason, only ever managed to communicate ably with the people who worked and lived with them for along time and when their communications were transcribed, invariably the trainer would say something or ask a question and then note 10 or 20 signs and pull from within that pile 2 or 3 that ‘answered’ the question. I’m not saying it’s all a fraud, but basically, it’s all a fraud. (But when the trainers say it’s not, I don’t think they’re lying. Just in denial.)
No, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to have meaningful conversations with animals (with the possible exceptions of cetaceans and certain apes). If you compare a human brain to that of a dog or a cat (There’s a display at the Mutter Museum that does this. It’s one of the many reasons I love the place), you’ll notice that besides being bigger human brains are vastly more complex. You can think ‘I am running low on food. I will go grocery shopping tomorrow. I must remember coupons’. A dog or cat can think ‘Hungry. Want food. Gimme food!’
Do dogs know the difference between the living and the dead? Yes.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “communicating”. They definitely look to see whether you understand what they are trying to tell you – because they learn the parameters of a job, and when something outside the job description comes up, they know they need more instructions. If you call that “stimulus- response”, then okay.
Are we going to talk with animals using language? Pretty emphatic no, in my opinion. They don’t think in language and can’t be taught to except in a quite primitive way, as far as I know. But I and all the other animal trainers that I know do think of the back-and-forth between the animal and human feels more like conversation than anything else. That’s our human word for communication between sentient beings.