If I could talk to the animals

Two messages arrived recently which, if taken together, first ask then answer the same question. The first reads, in part: “Although my dog tilts his head and wiggles his ears whenever I talk to him I keep wondering if he actually understands anything I am saying. Do they really learn certain words, or is it our tone and body language that tell dogs what we’re trying to say?”

And the second message, a letter: “I always enjoy your columns and it is obvious that we share a love of the animals. During my eight decades of life I have shared the love of many pets. I also raised three kids, helped with the granddaughters, and now a great grandson.” The writer goes on to reference a recent article she read which, according to her, “…questions animals’ abilities to understand us. Frankly I was shocked! Do animals understand us, do they know the words we speak to them? Yes, duh!”

Technically speaking, I don’t believe that duh is either English or Doglish, but we must forgive an otherwise eloquent individual who goes on: “My two Labs are my constant companions, and while the vocab may be limited they certainly know ‘up’ from ‘down,’ ‘front yard’ from ‘back yard.’ They understand the difference between ‘check it out’ when something seems a bit threatening, and ‘let’s check out the garden.’ They know ‘down’ when they want to jump on guests, different from ‘all the way down’ when they’re working on a treat. My two, and I suspect many others, know enough English to get by just fine.”

Let me put in my own two cents worth. Dogs and cats work long and hard to understand what we mean; anyone who lives with a companion animal has their own examples of this. They depend upon us for so much and are surely smart enough to understand that the sounds and gestures we make have a definite impact on their lives. After all, they use sounds and gesture for communicating too.

In essence, language is a cluster of sounds and gestures that a group of users agrees to accept; a group agrees that this noise and that motion mean a particular something. I know of no rule that says that other species cannot join that conspiracy of agreement. While humans may boldly claim our language is too complex for the small brains of other animals, anyone who has heard the songs of whales — or even the birds in our own yards — has reason to doubt such smug assertion. Perhaps a better question than do dogs understand English, is to ask which of us is clever enough to fully hear all of the others’ messages that daily fill the air?

In the end I don’t know the answer. My own Archie and Frida smile at me when I tell them I love them, and show that they love me in return in ways that I clearly understand. The rest is gravy.