I read a fas­ci­nat­ing newslet­ter this morn­ing, writ­ten by a sci­en­tist who has con­ducted research to prove that ani­mals have well-devel­oped lan­guage skills. As the owner of two cats with obvi­ous social and com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, I know that pets try very hard to com­mu­ni­cate with their human fam­ily mem­bers. Ani­mals can “speak,” if only we have the hearts and minds to “hear” them.

Pro­fes­sor Con Slo­bod­chikoff has con­ducted exten­sive research into the vocal­iza­tions of prairie dogs. His find­ings indi­cate that prairie dogs use a vari­ety of sounds to alert each other about poten­tial dan­gers from preda­tors approach­ing their bur­rows.

These ani­mals use dif­fer­ent and dis­tinc­tive sounds to warn about dogs, coy­otes, hawks, humans or other poten­tial preda­tors. They use spe­cial sounds to cat­e­go­rize their alerts based on whether the preda­tor is approach­ing on foot or from the air. His research also sug­gests that their alarm calls include sig­nals about prox­im­ity or the phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of indi­vid­ual preda­tors, such as dif­fer­ent col­ors. His book on what he has learned about ani­mal lan­guage will appear later this fall: Chas­ing Doc­tor Doolit­tle, Novem­ber 2012.

While my cats have a rel­a­tively lim­ited vocab­u­lary, Pro­fes­sor Slo­bod­chikoff writes that some herd­ing dogs have learned sev­eral thou­sand words, and can dis­tin­guish between words they know and unknown words based on their actions in research tri­als.

Pro­fes­sor Slo­bod­chikoff also spec­u­lates on the pos­si­bil­ity of future pet-owner trans­la­tion devices, so we can more clearly under­stand each other. There are many poten­tial appli­ca­tions, from the mun­dane to the impor­tant: from “Clean up my lit­ter­box, or I’ll leave some­thing nasty on your floor” to alerts about spe­cific intrud­ers or warn­ing a fam­ily mem­ber that the dog can smell can­cer cells (which research has proven is pos­si­ble).

I look for­ward to the day when pets and own­ers can under­stand each other, so pets will feel less inclined to act out and mis­be­have when their own­ers per­sist in ignor­ing what the pet wants to con­vey.