Monday, March 30, 2009
Animal language
Mary Midgley makes a very interesting point when she says that animals would live in utter disorder if they lacked both emotion and some form of communication. Just a few moment before I wrote this blog I was playing with my dog and I signaled to my dog that I wanted to play with a specific toy by merely pointing to it. Language is meant to truly represent ideas and the world around us in a cohesive fashion. Such communication is done in many ways such as my pointing for my dog. Whether my dog understood what I meant from actually understanding what I wanted or through a trained response, like Pavlov’s dogs, does not matter. The fact remains that my dog understood what I meant without any form of formal language at all. My ability to communicate with my dog came out of a mutual understanding of the objective world around us. I may perceive the world slightly differently than my dog, but all the laws of nature apply to us both equally. The ability to communicate with animals is not the preserve of Dr. Doolittle, but shared by all beings that can sense things in the same manner. My dog feels the pain caused by fire in much the same manner as I would. Dogs can clearly map out ideas in their mind, admittedly, these ideas are few and severely limited by their inability to properly communicate and understand abstract ideas. A dog might not understand the concept of justice, but it certainly understands what it senses. No animal starves because it’s too stupid to know what food is; it knows it is hungry and it wants to eat. It is purely preposterous to claim that because animals lack formal language that they lack the ability to understand the world around them and likewise emotion. I know precisely what emotion my dog was feeling because he was wagging his tail as well as other body language.
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This post made me think about the way animals communicate. Mary Midgley points out that some believe because animals cannot speak they do not have thoughts and therefore no desires or interests. Because they have no interests they have no moral rights, some might say. But, we know that animals communicate just not through a spoken language like our own. Instead of looking at this as animals being incapable to speak words I see it as quit an amazing outcome. Animals must use other ways to communicate, wether it be throgh actions, sounds, bodily functions, and behaviors. When a dog is happy (assuming happy is an emotion felt by a dog), like mentioned above, it wags it's tail. We know this because overtime dog owners have observed that when given a treat, being pet, or given a toy/bone, dogs wag their tails. Something that tastes good or feels good generally makes one happy. A person could merely say, "That makes me happy", but it's not as easy for a dog who uses his/her tail to communicate happiness.
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