Our dog Kitty can talk. Well, after a fashion. She certainly communicates with me, from morning — about 5:15 a.m., when she appears at my bedside and makes a plaintive growl, which means, unequivocally, "Get the fuck up and take me outside" — to midday, when she fixes me with a probing glare which means, "Where is my goddamn mid-day snack?" To evening, when she assumes what I consider a "significant look," meaning it's time to go outside, again. With various remarks in between. For instance, during a thunderstorm, she hurries to wherever I am, even in the bathroom, and stands very close, which I know means, "I blame you for this: Protect me!"
Though people do believe their pets can communicate with them in a variety of unexpected ways. As I learned over Memorial Day weekend, visiting the Naperville home of some longtime friends. In their kitchen, my attention was snagged by four brightly colored hexagons arranged on the floor by the refrigerator, each containing six buttons that, when pressed, utter a recorded phrase in the owner's voice, like "Play!" and "Cat box — stinky" and "Oops, I puked."
I demanded: Does your cat really communicate with you through these buttons? They assured me the cat did. Nor are they alone in this belief.
"Social media is filled with videos showing dogs, cats and parrots learning the meaning of dozens of buttons and pressing them to 'talk' with their people," Robyn Schelenz writes in "Can our pets really say ‘I love you’? Science is finding out" on the University of California web page. "And a few of these chatty animals have become minor celebrities as they seemingly converse, not just about food and walks, but about more complex concepts like love, strangers and time, opening a window, potentially, into what our pets are thinking."
Schelenz turns out to be, not a researcher, but with the school's marketing department. Ah.
Her story does bring up Clever Hans, the famous performing horse that was supposedly communicating, doing math problems and such by clomping its hoof, when it was really being subtly directed by its owner. The possibility exists that owners eager to be in closer communication with their beloved pets are misinterpreting random presses. Cat boxes are generally stinky.
Schelenz cites a study being done by the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California's Animal Communication Project.
"The use of soundboards has the potential to be a powerful tool through which dogs, cats, and other domestic animals might be able to communicate their needs, wants, and internal states to their owners," the project explains, in a post looking for volunteers for a broad national study. "The potential welfare impacts of this technology are powerful: if pets can tell their owners when they feel ill, for example, they might be taken to the vet sooner and treated before their condition becomes severe."
So the jury is out, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure it's been brought up before. But do we really want to know what our pets are thinking? Most cats seem to be trying to tell their owners — and generally succeeding, if demeanor is any indication — "Hey, you suck!"
Maybe when Kitty delivers her morning whine, what she means to say is, "There is no God!" but I, misreading her intent, take her outside and, being there, she does her business.
Our tortoiseshell kitty, Mazel Tuff Cocktail, lived with us for twenty years.
ReplyDeleteShe was extremely smart. She could unlatch screen doors.
Hell, she was brilliant.
Asked her how much ten minus ten was.
And she always said nothing.
When I was growing up, my father would put meat in front of our dog.
Then he would say "Trayf!" "Trayf!" And the dog wouldn't move.
Not until he heard the word "Kosher!" Then he would snarf it right up.
As I recall, people seemed to think this was extremely clever and funny.
But it was just his tone of voice. Same as saying "No!" and "Yes!"...BFD.
There was an icebreaker at a work meeting a few years ago, where we were asked which super power we would choose: invisibility, the ability to understand animals, or teleportation. I choose the ability to understand animals -- just so I could better understand my dog. Another attendee said "No way. I do not need the squirrels dissing my outfit when I leave for work in the morning." Everyone else chose teleportation -- but then most of them had had to use the CTA to get the meeting that day and there was nothing they'd like better than to never have to use it again.
ReplyDeleteAlmost every night my cat says "I know I spent the last 12+ hours sleeping on "our" bed, but now that you've joined me, and are trying to read, I think I'll sit on your chest and block your vision. Aren't I just the cutest? "
ReplyDeleteNah. I don't need to know what my fur babies are thinking every minute. I've already got human kids to tell me what I do wrong. BTW, little Kitty is a bit of a potty mouth
ReplyDeleteIf your dog Kitty is saying "there is no god" the dog is totally correct!
ReplyDeleteThere are a number of studies indicating that dogs have a vocabulary of human words that they're able to understand.
ReplyDeleteI heard something on NPR about genius dogs. They can have a vocabulary of over 100 words. Not all dogs but some dogs
I have two dogs one of them has a vocabulary of at least 20 words the other one maybe five.
It certainly has something to do with tone when we communicate with one another tone and and bodily movements small cues to one another help us to communicate and understand one another.
Sign language demonstrates the importance of the subtle cues.
Our cat on the other hand seems if anything less interested in responding whether it understands or not is difficult to determine. I sure understand what he wants. And if I don't get up to feed him he uses my leg as a scratching post
Bill
I always liked the theme behind Thomas Edison’s Shaggy Dog!
ReplyDeleteHere's an interesting sidebar, taken from J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the epic Science Fiction series Babylon 5:
ReplyDelete"Many reading this will be familiar with the efforts made, from the 1960s to the present, to teach sign language to gorillas and other primates. These programs have been largely successful, and at first glance this would seem to erode one of the key distinctions between humans and animals.
It doesn’t. If anything, it reinforces the crucial difference we’re circling.
Here’s the Rosetta Stone: In over sixty years of teaching primates sign language, not one of them has ever asked a question unrelated to a task at hand or its immediate needs.
The questions they produced by signing were always strictly functional: requests for food, water, companionship, or tickling, never to gather knowledge or interrogate their surroundings or their situation. This led researchers to develop the Theory of Mind, which has two components: First, there must be an understanding that someone else may have information they do not possess. Second, the synaptic architecture needed to produce the desire to use language to speculate or discuss abstract concepts outside their immediate circumstance simply does not exist. It’s not that they are prevented from having thoughts that lead to questions, only that when they look up at the sky, they lack the predilection to ask, What’s up there?
By contrast, humans begin asking questions as soon as they can speak. Why is the grass green? Where do balloons go? Why are you wearing that hat?
The definitional human trait is curiosity over time that goes beyond immediate needs to interrogate the world, to ask why things are the way they are."
(Link: https://jmichaelstraczynski.substack.com/p/silence-where-a-story-would-have)
Now, admittedly, he's talking about the genesis of storytelling and why AI will likely never surpass humans in that capacity. The logic, I think, still holds.
I believe it was Wittgenstein who sai"if a lion could talk, it wouldn't be a lion." Animals and the rest of the natural world only need to be themselves to be sources of joy and wonder. They don't need to conform themselves to the restrictions of humanity.
ReplyDeleteExcellent kicker, Neil!
ReplyDeleteThis seems to be a very gussied-up and complexified version of what is really a pretty basic problem: how can we communicate with animals (or, to put it a more interesting way, "How can they communicate with us?")? Once we devise a useful method for doing so, things may get much more interesting, very quickly, and it might be the animals steering the conversation.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, they can already convey basic stuff that can be communicated to us various ways: I need to go out. I'm hungry. I'm happy to see you. I'm REALLY happy to see you. They learn various techniques of expression and they learn what they can expect to get from each one. If we simplify their task to just having to press a button for a particular need or want (e.g. walkies, treats, a glass of Diet Coke), then we have an open-ended path to add more and more buttons, and to see what we can build on. We are limited more by our imagination than theirs.
If Trump can be trained to press a button to get a Diet Coke, anything is possible. A cat communicating via a button isn't that different is it?
ReplyDelete