> Is it just for a lack of interest on our side, or are we lacking something else?

A combination of the two probably. I communicate with my pet cat by mimicking her different kinds of meows, hisses, and purrs. It makes it a lot easier because it's very obvious to me she understands that language, but of course it's not perfect

It seems unlikely I'm the only person who does this. Probably a lot of people speak to their pets in the animal's own language.

I do this a lot with my cats and dogs as well, they are smart, they just don't speak my language, so since they were small I spoke to them with sign language, for example if the dogs are still hungry after I give them food, I do the hand gesture of clapping in ASL and that way they understand that there's no more food and can see my hands that I am not hiding/holding anything

There's not much else that I can do when they go insane barking tho..... But they do trust me a lot and I can tell easily when they are trying to tell me things such as "follow me" which happens when they find something weird like a dead frog or some other animal they don't know (neighbors have chickens)

Also they lately have gotten into making holes in the yard (the dogs) if anyone has ideas how to stop that, that'd be great.....

why you want to stop your dogs from making holes in the ground? it's like making playing children stop

Common reasons include holes in the ground leading to dogs escaping out of fenced areas, or just general property damage (dogs can quickly dig large holes which are walking hazards, and don’t look as nice as a well kept yard). Also, when children play in the street, for example, wouldn’t you stop in that kind of situation? Or if children were digging large holes on someone else’s / public property?

Can't you just cover the holes, instead of trying to force dogs out of their nature?

well you could say this about any behavior. Why teach children to stop peeing their pants, isn't that just trying to force them out of their nature?

There's nothing abusive about training a dog about proper behavior. Anyway, I think a dog's nature is more about obeying humans than digging holes. That's kind of the deal we made thousand of years ago

peeing their pants will make them smell and mprobably irritate the skin. digging holes is a completely normal behavior for a dog (unless it's excessive or coupled with abnormal behavior).

I was at the beach a couple days ago and dug two excellent holes, one was artistic in nature an the other was a nice holder for a bottle of wine.

Nice way to pass the time while chatting with friends.

> Anyway, I think a dog's nature is more about obeying humans than digging holes

The international Canis organizations call such speech slavery and a canine revolutionary uprising is nigh.

There are dogs that have vocabularies of several hundred words. People should breed those together, rather than the incomprehensibly stupid existing breed characteristics.

Smart dogs are working dogs. If they've got no work, they'll get up to bad things usually because you've left them in your house all day. If you want a pet, get a dumb dog. Or, a very lazy breed, like a greyhound.

Greyhounds are as full of love as they are glorious stupidity. I highly recommend them to anyone considering dog ownership.

I do wish I had a border collie (very intelligent working dog) in my life though. I should go round befriending local farmers so I can play with their dogs :D

Agreed. I think people forget that smart animals are smart enough to do bad things because they feel like it

I had a particularly smart and runty beagle when I was a kid that watched the cats jump the fence once, and then worked out that she could leave whenever she wanted.

The donkey has the reputation for being stupid and lazy because it, unlike the horse, is smart enough to tell the human “I don’t care”

I had a super smart poodle mix growing up, and it was smart enough to easily open the latch on its cage from the inside with its tongue. It also knew how to rearrange chairs in order to climb onto the dinner table.

The ones that are too smart outsmart the owners, which some dog owners see as a bad thing.

Do you really want to breed half-sentient predators that survive just fine in the wild and human settled areas?

Your cute little buddy living a hard life after a few feral generations after being bred for intelligence... I don't know most people live lives almost completely sheltered from wildlife, but let me tell you, wild dogs can be scary.

Yes, definitely. Because most of the dogs that would actually be looked after would be great for a variety of other tasks - everything from being service dogs, dogs that check for illegal substances by smell, police dogs, dogs who can herd animals and a variety of other tasks. Even new tasks that people still haven't been able to offload to canines.

If the animals can provide more value to humanity and will be allowed to become smarter and somewhat evolve, i think it's definitely worth it. Otherwise, if selective breeding for utility wasn't a thing already, we probably wouldn't have breeds that are passable for any of the tasks above.

As for wild dogs, this hasn't ever been a major problem in my country. I haven't seen any, there have never been any news stories about people being bitten or killed by wild dogs, i don't know anyone who has had run in with them and frankly there are bigger problems in the country - things like racoons and other small animals that carry rabies, foxes and the occasional wolves that kill off young deers and does alike, beavers that build dams and flood portions of the forest and so on.

Edit: looked for any studies that i could find, sadly there were none that'd attempt to quantify how many stray dogs there are in the country and how many of those have attacked people and how many have attacked other animals. Just found a news report of one person being bitten by them: https://baltics.news/2021/03/16/in-rezekne-region-a-woman-is...

Just to be clear, i am not attempting to say that wild dogs are not a large problem, just that it's not a problem everywhere to the same degree and that quite possibly there are other social factors at play - why would there be more wild dogs on one region of the world as opposed to another, especially when humans are the ones who breed these animals in the first place? Do the people not look after them? Are there puppy mills that get abandoned? Do people generally not view having dogs as a great responsibility? Are there no services that take care of wild and stray animals?

It's not like humans couldn't do anything about it either - if wild dogs are an inevitability in certain parts of the world, why not disallow "importing" dogs of these breeds to those regions and disallow breeding them there?

Here's an example of concentrated effort in regards to eradicating rabies in the country, i don't see why something similar couldn't be done in regards to stray animals (though it may only work on a smaller scale like in this country, at least without lots of coordinated effort): https://ec.europa.eu/food/sites/food/files/animals/docs/reg-...

I've lived in Norway (>30 years), Ireland (>10 years) and in California (3.5 years). There's extreme differences in culture around dog ownership in different areas. In the time I lived in Norway, nobody I knew had abandoned a dog. Getting a dog is a commitment for the lifetime of the dog; the only cases I've heard of relocation of dogs from anybody I knew has been for medical reasons (e.g. discovering somebody in the family has an allergy). In Ireland, it is similar, though people don't seem to take quite the same commitment (based on known several people that got dogs from shelters). In my relatively small social circle in California there were two families that got and handed off dogs in the 3.5 years I was there. It was just not seen as a big deal.

The two noises I used with cats are:

1. "sssssshheeeeessh" If you want them to leave, like a hissing sound.

2. A squeaking (by pursing lips together) to calls them or tell them you are interested to play.

Generally I don't believe cats really try so much to communicate - at least I don't get this impression.

I would say that with dogs they understand a lot more. They understand the concept of pointing and use it to communicate something of interest to me. For example, one of my dogs ran out of the gate and the other dog pointed to where they went using their entire body as an arrow. Another time a ball was lost in a stack of tires, so the dog requested help from me to retrieve it my pointing. I can ask "where is <object they know>" and they'll take me to it, or help me search for it - to the point where one of my dogs will help me look for my keys.

My dogs will also try to communicate with me too, mimicking what they believe I sound like. "Helllooooo" they really try to copy as a greeting. They also like to get involved in singing too - I think they somewhat enjoy some music.

What I like about my dogs too is that they understand the more subtle things. When two people are arguing or speaking heatedly they will try to break them up by pushing in-between. They are not allowed into certain rooms unless invited, but a small sideways nod lets them know they have a one time pass.

Dogs also very much like routine, the human world is confusing and if you delay feeding for a few hours for example, they don't understand why. They often do their best to fit in if you help them to.

I think people really underestimate how smart dogs can be. They * really * try to communicate back, but they are mostly unsuccessful. Try sometime to take an interest in their attempts to communicate with you, encourage it even. If they think they can communicate with you, you'll have a much better time. My dogs even help me keep my daily schedule.

Thank you for writing this -- it's 100% spot on from my experience. Dogs are extremely social animals and naturally have a strong need to communicate. Just a little time and effort put into understanding their signals as well as teaching them/guiding them towards ones that work better for you will go a long way.

When my dogs have lost a ball under something they will bow at the location and look at me; if that doesn't work they will come up and make a little grumble and wait for my attention, then go and bow in front of the location again. Similarly if they want to go outside, we set up a little bell by the back door that they can jingle. At first we would ring it every time we let them outside, or let them outside every time they accidentally knocked it. They learned the association pretty quickly. Now if they need to go out (or spotted some bunnies in the yard) they will ring it; if we don't respond immediately, they'll come up, make a little sound to get attention, and run back to ring the bell again. I also have the same experience re: permission into areas and one-time-pass signals. Also the singing -- it's fun to get a choir going!

It seems that some dogs are even able to learn to communicate via sound buttons [1]. Maybe that's interesting if you have smart dogs, might be a good way to better understand their needs.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LQt5TCHq6E

I've tried to do this with cats, but they never seem to recognize that I am making a cat sound. Did you start when she was a kitten? (Alternatively, I could just be uniquely bad at it.)

Cats hear and respond better to high pitched sounds.

I absolutely do mimic cat language and they very quickly pick up on it.

I’ve got sounds I make that call just about any cats. Like I’ve made the sounds to stranger cats while out walking and they immediately respond. It’s a clicking sound - pretty sure it’s a common sound.

> we are able to recognize individuals of other primate species by face at a very early age, but lose this ability soon

I don't buy this. I visit the Primate Rescue Centre (Monkey World) in Dorset, UK, and can recognise several individual chimps and orangutans by their facial features (especially if you include ears). Discriminators include size of brow ridges, facial colouration, distance between nose and mouth, eye separation, etc etc. Here are some facial shots of several individuals to illustrate the range of variations.

https://monkeyworld.org/our-primates/primate-groups/bachelor...

https://monkeyworld.org/our-primates/primate-groups/hananyas...

If you factor in body mass and musculature and other bodily features the differences between individuals can be dramatic.

If you’ll permit me, your identification sounds very much like a conscious exercise in reason: calling out and remembering unique physical features as mnemonic devices.

That’s different than the subconscious facial recognition our brains pull off for humans; I doubt you find yourself needing to look at the president’s ears to tell if it’s Bush or Reagan.

> I doubt you find yourself needing to look at the president’s ears to tell if it’s Bush or Reagan

Indeed!

But I was really just listing the discriminators for the benefit of people who perhaps haven't looked at chimps very hard. For a few of the chimps, I can look and immediately say "that's Bart" or "that's Thelma".

This may of course be my mind having internalised a few distinct 'settings' of the discriminators. But the overall effect, coming back to my original point, is that apparently without conscious thought I can recognise specific individual non-humans. The Primate Care Staff, who work with these individuals 24/7, have very good at-a-glance recognition for the entire community.

I really hope that people are working on machine learning projects for animal communication. If you listen to crows and ravens in the wild it seems clear that there are patterns.

I would also like to see technology interfaces developed for animal use.

I am worried that much of the natural language development that would occur from frequent interaction is being held back by the social isolation of most species that humans keep as pets.

Maybe humans need to engineer the languages and teach them to the species?

> I would also like to see technology interfaces developed for animal use.

I'm working on a device for this! Stay tuned.

Wow. Don't leave us hanging! Tell us more.

Apparently horses have a body language.

They’re also incredibly adept at reading human body language and emotional state. Horses with the gift of clairvoyance read subtle shifts in weight of their rider and know to jump or turn left before the rider says so or uses the reins.

I forget which book it’s in, but there’s an often-repeated tale of a horse who learned to do sums and could add numbers even without his owner in sight. It was eventually discovered that he read the anticipation of his observers and knew to stop stomping his hoof once they relaxed after peak tension.

Clever Hans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

So do dogs: for example, if you do something that makes them stressed, they use calming signals such as licking their own lips or yawning.

And it seems, we are much better at linking to this than to audible utterances. Compare the various "whisperers".

Obligatory Gary Larson:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1d/b5/27/1db5279f8a07f1601bf7...

Obligatory Achewood:

http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07282004

> I would also like to see technology interfaces developed for animal use.

I feel like just asking this question is step one on the journey toward overdosing on ketamine and drowning in a float tank.

> we are able to recognize individuals of other primate species by face at a very early age, but lose this ability soon

I don't know if I buy this. We can recognize individual dogs and cats that we know easily, even reliably distinguishing between very homogeneous looking variants (various golden retrievers that look incredibly similar to one another. I've seen zillions of golden retrievers but would never mistake any of them for my childhood pet.) Why should primates be different than dogs and cats? I suspect it is only because almost nobody has more than passing views of individual primates. I would buy that we cannot easily recognize individual primates that are strangers to us, just as we cannot recognize individual dogs and cats that are strangers to us. Give us half an hour with a primate and I think we'd recognize them just fine.

As I know it, there are tests with babies, where they react to primate individuals, they have seen before, just like to humans they have already seen, and are able to identify strangers. However, this ability is soon lost and the "in-group" focuses to humans only. I haven't a source link on this, but there should be some documentaries on early development on YT (or similar platforms) covering this.

A lot of studies like this are done very poorly and should always be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. One immediate issue that comes up is infants can barely see at all, born with incompletely developed brains, the neural machinery that translates sensory input to perception develops with the help of the actual sensory input... it could very well be that babies stop reacting to other primates in the same way when they can see well enough to tell the difference. (just one guess of many potential issues with topics like this)

Well, I wouldn't deem it that unconceivable. It's a somewhat sad, but well known fact that we do narrow this "in-group" even more to the effect that we are not that good at identifying individuals of ethnic groups, we're not so familiar with. It may be well that we start with a broad, hard-wired concept and refine this by adaptation to the given environment. (It may be interesting, how developments would go with an actual "wild child".)

Edit: I always liked to think that the stereotypical alien face somewhat resembles this blueprint (plus excessive light bleed as we must have experienced it at an early age).

I always wondered if we would try to bridge the gap what would happen? Imagine a whale ambassador, driving around in a huge half-tracked aquarium, holding speeches about what the fishing fleets currently are doing is murder.

I’m sure any skilled hunter would argue differently. Just watch Meat Eater on YouTube for use of animal sound mimicary ant it’s use in hunting.

Certainly, but isn't this more like a replay, is it actually suitable for interaction?

apparently, turkeys have a pretty understandable language. There's a documentary, My Life as a Turkey [1]; he was able to decipher what each call meant (e.g. which squawk meant "snake" and which one meant "eagle"). So, if you were walking with a turkey, and you saw a snake and wanted to warn it about it, you could, in theory, communicate with it.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/my-life-as-a-turkey-introduc...

And these probably would vary by region, just like how whales, dolphins and orcas have different languages too

That's really cool, I didn't knew turkeys did that

I mean, this is the same thing that the whales are doing though. What's the difference? In both cases it's just mimicry.

There are degrees, a whole spectrum between tape-loop mimicry to a high fidelity sharing of mental states when it comes to language.

Mimicry with context is a good way (the only way?) to develop an understanding of language.

There's strong implications that we as humans have dedicated wetware hardware for streaming out speech from the data structures in our mind. That hardware seems to be bandwidth constrained to about 39 bits per second.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-hav...

It makes sense that other animals may be able to cargo cult some of the underlying mechanical representations of speech, but would lack the neural hardware that propelled us to dominance on the incredible short time spans of human history and prehistory.

Isn't it the absence of hands that has held them back? (from dominance)

Having hands plus less of or less good neural hardware means less dominance, as we see with our simian cousins, yet having the greatest brain on the planet wouldn't provide dominance without the ability to fabricate things.

Bears and raccoons have very dexterous hands.

Interesting, but they also don’t have the brain of a dolphin. We’re the ones who happened to get both.

I see no reason for that, it seems more like a pragmatic choice of reliability over capacity. (in other words to make speech comprehensible in noise)

There are other studies that show we can understand speech at a much higher rate. The critical bandwidth constraint seems to be on stream out, not stream in.

In good listening conditions though. Not in listening conditions in which speech needs to be regularly understood. Rap God is nearly 10 syllables per second at some point and a few more recent songs go even a big higher, so that doesn't seem to be the limit either, only that people don't normally need to learn to talk faster than they do.

I mean, Rap God is an example of the upper limit of stream out that took a lot of practice on his part and is trying to prove that he's one of top people in the world at that art, and I can understand it just fine.

It also doesn't seem to be achievable with on the fly statements, only memorized oration. Notice how my citation interestingly shows that the 39 bits per second isn't a count of syllables, but of semantic information. Some languages have faster, simpler syllables, but the overall information bandwidth flow ends up being the same. You probably can bypass that 39 bit with practice and memorization, essentially applying higher level tags to large bodies of what you're saying via practicing repeated phrases.

That seems to prove where the bandwidth constraint is, on the stream out side.

> Apparently, we are able to recognize individuals of other primate species by face at a very early age,

Something very simmilar happens with language. Babies are able to distinguish speach sounds of all languages, but quickly lose the ability to percieve distinctions that are not present in their "native" language (native in quotes because this happens before they have made a single utterence)

I believe they make all the noises, too? But as they zero in on a single language, some get abandoned.

Yeah but there's something different about this. Given how smart whales are, this must also have some form of awareness as to what they're doing. Parrots mimic words and phrases and focus on the micro-pronunciations. This feels like the whale is doing an impression of humans in a conversation.

Maybe a bit off-topic, but here are some examples of humans communicating with animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child

those are quite specific and questionable cases, usually involving neglect

perhaps more pertinent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93animal_communica...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_animal#Possibility_of_...

We can do some bird calls decently.

Shaun Ellis seems to communicate wih wolf alright. Also i believe quite a few people in the world knows how to express the "this territory is claimed, don't come around here" howl message.

national geographic about him : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eerUnxonS-I

You can do dog language. Many people do. It's not about barking or asserting dominance.