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Some people talk to animals. Not many listen, though. That’s the problem.

When I was young, I could talk to my dog; and I knew he could answer me -but mainly with his body, and especially his eyes. I was sure he understood me in a way my mother usually did. Friends are like that, though; it’s as much through their expressions as in what they say; communication is more than words.

But maybe you have to want to understand; maybe communication is in the intent as well as in the reception. It’s hard to repudiate your dog’s intent when you are young; it’s easy to doubt when you mature. We judge by what we know; we evaluate to align with our own conceits, and arrange it to agree with our mood. There is wisdom in the King James Biblical passage that argues that ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

But, there is perhaps even more wisdom in what was questionably attributed to A.A. Milne in his Winnie the Pooh: ‘Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.’ Or maybe they listen and not only fail to understand, but suspect that what they hear is not speech -only some form of primitive reaction essential for survival; non-vocabularic communication; warning signals conveying time-limited information.

Perhaps some of them are nonspecific alerts, but what about the occasional chatter of squirrels to each other, or the questions posed by noisy crows widely scattered among the branches in a dense forest, that seem to ask where the rest of their flock is and what it’s doing? Anyone walking in the forest has to wonder whether there are many conversations going on – if they decide to listen, that is; if they’re curious…

Still, even if we could understand the meaning of these, what would we make of them? What should we do with them? And even if we think we know, should we try to answer back? Or would that be misleading -like an imposter sending naïvely false information, or inadvertently confusing the recipient from performing some needed action to which we are not, and could not, be privy? Not so much disinformation, as misinformation? I wonder…

AI technologies have been used ‘to decode the vocalisation patterns of crows and other social animals, such as whales, elephants and bats. It is increasingly used to uncover the meaning behind their signals, shedding new light on how and what animals communicate… At first, these new technologies could be a friend to animals, allowing human beings to expand their knowledge of animals’ emotional and social lives’ [i]

Or are we simply interfering in different Magisteria -yet again assuming that our epistemic reasoning, our customs, our logic is equally applicable to them? Surely, although we are in the same worlds, we are not of the same worlds… If we attempted to treat those animals with whom we tried to communicate with human-derived tenets -whether well-meaning or inadvertently confusing to beings with which we share a world but not a purpose- is that an ethical goal?

For that matter, if this directly interfered with our own food chain because of a realization of the suffering we cause with unsanitary feed lots, overcrowded industrial chicken coops with each of their beaks clipped to prevent them from pecking each other in their panic; or slowed our scientific progress from experiments on caged lab animals -if these everyday cruelties were attested to by the animals themselves… would we find this acceptable? Would anything change?

And anyway, ‘animal communication is an incredibly complex phenomenon. Even more than human communication, it relies on non-verbal cues… as good as AI tools such as language models are at finding patterns, they are often not actually deciphering meaning. And, even when they do appear to get it right, there is no guarantee that they actually have…  a challenge widely known as the ‘black box’ problem in AI science and ethics. This raises a troubling possibility: we might end up generating digital animal sounds that seem meaningful to the animals, but without actually knowing what we are saying.

‘As Tom Mustill highlights in the book How to Speak Whale (2022), the sounds of animal communications probably are ‘the glue that holds their cooperative lives together – vital in keeping close, hunting, navigating, mating, and protecting one another.’ Exposing them to digitally generated sounds that irritate or confuse them could interfere with the culture of an animal population that has evolved over hundreds of years.’

I fear the weaponization of ‘speaking animal’ -hunting, for example; how is that benefitting them; how is that ethical; how is simply understanding their needs and wants being served? Perhaps even more existentially, ‘the most profound impact of AI-mediated communication might not be regulatory, but existential. If we could finally hear animals as communicative beings, we would no longer view them as passive figures in our world, but as agents within it. Animals such as whales, crows, cows, chickens and prairie dogs would no longer be seen as mute beings, but as interlocutors with preferences of their own.’

I suppose I have to take it right back to my childhood again. When I looked into my dog’s eyes, or saw his tail wag as I spoke to him, there was a form of wordless communication; and although neither of us could probably explain the bond between us, we could each feel that something important had been exchanged -perhaps similar to the gaze of a new mother into her baby’s eyes as it shared its love with her; or the wordless hug of two friends meeting again after a prolonged absence.

I’m not sure that knowing what the animal was saying would make me appreciate it any more that I already do.  I’m reminded of something the philosopher Alan Watts once wrote -I can’t remember the exact words, but it seemed to me that he was saying it wasn’t so much knowing where a flock of geese was headed, as enjoying the mystery it posed, and feeling the thrill of hearing the gradually receding honking sounds as they flew through the clouds over the lake. You don’t need words to explain it. No language is needed… they were communicating…

[i]https://psyche.co/ideas/even-if-we-could-speak-to-animals-should-we

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