31 mar One of my favorite characters was Dr
Doolittle in a series of books written by Hugh Lofting. Doolittle's ability to communicate with animals utterly fascinated me, together with his strange adventures in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh or in Africa. The possibility of really communicating with animals has tantalized me ever since. As I came to know over the years, we can't actually communicate in a human sense with any other animals. Of course some animals can learn commands and some seem to know their names. Some certainly know our voices and can tell us apart, and we can read their behaviors and sounds. And to an extent they have learned behaviors that elicit responses they want from me, pretty much limited to food and petting.
I know when my cats are hungry or when my dog wants to go out
But we've pretty much hit a brick wall in terms of syntactical communication – stringing together ideas with verbs and nouns and modifiers, discussing future and past and so forth. Some gorillas and chimps have famously learned some sign language, but as I mentioned earlier the meanings are https://americashpaydayloan.com/pawn-shops-nj/ blurry and a lot depends on the interpretation of the trainer.
The fact that we can't understand dolphins doesn't mean they aren't discussing all manner of things, both inside their heads – talking to themselves like we do – and in the wide ocean
The most intriguing exceptions in the animal kingdom are cetaceans: the dolphins and whales.