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Putting aside quibbling over what constitutes language, talking, etc, animals do clearly communicate to us and understand us (to some limit). They read our facial expressions, hear our tones, can distinguish words and names. Similarly: any pet owner who pays attention can learn to read the body language of their animal companions, their tone of voice, and sometimes even distinguish what the pet wants or how they feel from individual vocal articulations. We've managed to teach great apes to use signs to communicate to us. All this is to say: is there value in pretending like we can "translate" to english with complex grammar? Maybe not. But it might be interesting to learn and track, say, which sort of meow is "play with me", which is "feed me", which is "I'm stressed", which is "I want another toy", which is "I'm worried about you", etc. There have been claims of teaching dogs to use buttons to communicate complex things; some of it is easy to believe (eg I have taught my own dogs to press a button when they want to go out—relatively straightforward conditioning), but some of it might be a performance for social media. I understand the skepticism, but it's surely worth researching to what extent the dogs actually are "communicating" versus seeking specific things, or even indicating concerns or emotions to us. This gets even more interesting with animals with complex socialization of their own: whales, dolphins, birds, etc. Domesticated animals and our close relatives already have a genetic edge in communicating with us; but intraspecies communication of animals can be opaque or literally outside our ability to hear or differentiate. Surely algorithms and automated recording/correlation could reveal the complexity of these relations. |