[coldtea]

"We would [understand the Lion]. We're flexible and can get into different perspectives, and we have been close to animal living ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years, plus we watch nature and learn about how lions live and what they do. The lion would have difficulty understanding us, as our world is a superset of its world" - coldtea

[Mawr]

Yeah, I think we'd be just fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky

> Nim's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."

[josefx]

One could argue that this isn't talking to a well adjusted animal living in its native habitat. It is talking to a long term research subject/victim suffering at the hands of "researchers" while trying to teach it a language that is utterly alien to it. Of course knowing how animals communicate in their natural habitat is not useful if you want to ask them deep questions like "what do you think about global warming" or "do you think god exists", to which they probably wouldn't have an answer anyway.