Sure, you talk to your pets all the time. Can we ever expect them to talk back?
Like a lot of people (and, I suspect, a whole lot of Angels readers) I talk to my dogs. “Why did you have to act that way?” I’ll snap at my schipperke, Mercury, after he’s barked at a passing dog on the street for no apparent reason. “All he wanted to do was make friends. But no—you had to go and be nasty.”
Up and down my block each day other dog owners are doing the same thing, addressing their schnauzers, Pomeranians, Shih Tzus, and plain mutts in full, complex, impassioned sentences (while indoors still others are also doing the same thing with their cats). Human beings may be, as the literary critic George Steiner put it, “the language animal,” but that doesn’t prevent a great many of us from talking to our fellow creatures as if they were language animals too.
Why does talking to animals feel so natural? Probably because, for most of human history, that’s just what it has been. “It was, and still is in many places,” writes poet and anthropologist David M. Guss, “a widely held belief that the part of the animal we see is not the real part but only a disguise, an outfit it wears when it comes to visit our world. Once home again, it removes that costume and changes back into its true form—a form no different from that of humans.”
Natural as talking to our nonhuman companions feels, however, these conversations do tend to be a little one-sided. Most animals, after all, don’t talk back to us.
Most don’t ... but not all. The idea that animals are at least potentially capable of communicating with humans goes back to earliest times. Many biblical commentators over the centuries have suggested that before the Fall, Adam and Eve were able to discourse with the animals who shared paradise with them as naturally and easily as they could with each other. Nor did the Fall entirely do away with people’s ability to understand animals—as Balaam’s ass proved when she verbally rebuked her master for failing to see the Angel of the Lord when he was standing right in front of them.
Even scientists—after centuries of arguing that human beings are the only creatures capable of language—are starting to sound a little less certain on the matter. In 1977 a Harvard-educated animal researcher named Irene Pepperberg set about teaching an African gray parrot named Alex to talk. Not on the Polly-wants-a-cracker level, but really talk. Alex soon developed a vocabulary of more than 100 words—including “ban-berry,” a word of his own coining, which he called apples because to him they tasted like bananas but looked like cherries.
In a recent National Geographic article, writer Virginia Morell described a visit she paid to Pepperberg and Alex (just before his death at the age of thirty) at Brandeis University. At a certain point in the visit, Pepperberg brought in younger parrots that were learning English with Alex’s help. Alex left off from talking to the humans and addressed his fellow birds—in English:
“Talk clearly!” he commanded when one of the younger birds mispronounced the word green.
“Don’t be a smart aleck,” Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. “He gets bored, so he interrupts the others or gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate.”
Parrots are equipped with a vocal anatomy which, though very different from that of humans, allows them to mimic the human voice—something that other super-smart animals like dogs, chimps and dolphins have a harder time doing. But it seems like some of these more vocally challenged species would like to imitate human speech, even if they don’t know how. Donna Kassewitz, a researcher at SpeakDolphin.com, a Miami-based group working to break the human-dolphin communication barrier (and a faithful Angels on Earth reader), told me a story that bore this out.
