Will we really be able to talk to animals one day?

Anyone with a pet has wondered at least once what is going through their dog’s or cat’s mind. Scientists cannot yet answer with certainty. But according to a research group at Rockefeller University in New York, a genuine human–animal translator may be ‘something achievable one day’. Why? Recently, enormous progress has been made in three fields which, taken together, could make it possible: computer processing power, artificial intelligence and increasingly sophisticated tools for analysing sounds. Some animals, in fact, can already ‘speak’ our language: parrots, for example, can learn to repeat human words. But this ability is extremely rare in nature. Conceiving a message and being able to produce complex sounds to communicate it requires special mental abilities and very fine control of the vocal muscles. Not every intelligent animal is also a good ‘speaker’. Take the great apes — bonobos, gorillas and chimpanzees: they are extremely intelligent animals, but they cannot produce complex sounds. In other words, they possess only one of the two necessary abilities. Some animals, however, appear to be promising candidates for a genuine conversation. Besides parrots, dolphins and whales may also one day ‘talk’ to us. In 2023, a group of scientists even exchanged a brief ‘dialogue’ with a humpback whale in Alaska: they played a previously recorded greeting, a series of sounds translated as ‘hello’, and the whale responded, thereby initiating a short exchange between different species. Another research group found that whale language shares certain statistical properties with human languages, meaning that it follows patterns and rules in the arrangement of sounds that closely resemble those of our words and sentences. In the meantime, many animal messages are already perfectly clear without any need for a high-tech translator, because animals are extremely expressive. The desperate meow of a cat in front of an empty bowl, for example, hardly needs translating to be understood. Nor does animal communication rely solely on sounds and voice. Dances, postures, colours and even objects can convey precise messages. Just think of a dog picking up its lead in its mouth and sitting by the front door: no dictionary is needed to understand what it is asking for. While we wait for a genuine science-fiction gadget, perhaps it is worth learning to observe more closely the countless, often surprising ways in which animals already communicate with us every day.