[wanderfowl]

Teaching about language in a university setting, we often talk about various forms of evidence for language-like communication among animals.

As I tell students, I would bet that within our lifetimes, as research continues and our instrumentation becomes better at detecting non-human communication means, we'll finally be able to detect and decode 'language' in a non-human animal which is sophisticated and rich enough as to be impossible to handwave away.

But what I keep to myself is that this kind of discovery, and the cross-species conversations it would prompt, has the potential to change the course of the dialogue on animal rights and what it means to be 'human'. But I suspect it will wind up being largely buried outside of certain academic and spiritual communities, mostly because I don't think parts of our society could handle learning the bovine words for 'slaughterhouse' or 'mourning'.

[friendlybus]

Christina Hunger has the ability to ask her dog questions and it goes to press a button that represents the idea it wants to reply with. That button plays an English word through a speaker for Christina. She's a speech pathologist on Instagram and has a website for it. The dog learns word association in the same way babies do.

Those videos are on Instagram, not buried. I'm fairly sure any breakthroughs will make it to a Planet Earth documentary and we'll feel sad about it for a while then go buy beef from the shops anyway.

[clairity]

that's neat. i talk to my dog all the time. she (a rescue) came to me already knowing "do you wanna go out?" but had a really hard time teaching me when she had anxiety diarrhea and needed to go out. i really needed a button for that (she's mostly over it now though).