We all understand that humans and animals cannot easily communicate with each other. Most animals find it hard to understand human speech (though some commands and phrases can be learned); we often find their body language (the product of millions of years of divergent evolution) opaque1; and their handwriting is appalling (though some can push buttons). Even dogs, animals that have lived with and been shaped by humans—and have shaped humans in return—for a very long time, can be hard to understand. Bad luck for any Timmies stuck down a well.
Humans often think that they are capable of understanding what an animal understands or wants, or that they have communicated clearly, but they can be mistaken2. How sure can you be that the animal understood you, or you them3?
It would be so convenient if there were some shortcut to bridging the gaps… Some way to tell the cat that no, he cannot scratch the sofa, to explain to the dog that you do not want a well-aged dead gopher, or to convince the local ravens that you are not their enemy. This common human wish makes for an engaging plot premise. An ability to converse with animals (magically or technically or somehow conferred) turns up in book after book. Such as the following.
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (1894)
Mowgli learns the language of the animals by the simple expedient of having been orphaned and then adopted and raised by wolves4. Conveniently for Mowgli, for the most part all animals speak the same language. This is not an unmixed blessing, as not everything animals say is something one wants to hear.
To be honest, I am pretty skeptical about many details of Kipling’s zoology. Dogs and cats are often baffled by the other’s body language. Canid and feline lineages diverged comparatively recently. Imagine the gulf between the snake Kaa and primate Mowgli. I don’t think that there is any fieldwork that supports the notion of a unified spoken language among animals. It’s almost as though The Jungle Book is not intended as a serious scientific hypothesis.
Daybreak—2250 A.D. by Andre Norton (1954)
Silver-haired Fors of the Puma Clan of the hidden city Eyrie is both victim of and beneficiary of the lingering radiation of the atomic war that was civilization’s final triumph. His visible deviation from local physiological norms makes him an outcast, but at least he is accompanied in his travels by his giant semi-telepathic cat Lura.
Honestly, the frequent existence of telepathic bonds with animals in the works of Andre Norton probably deserves its own essay. It feels like a bit of a cheat—surely, even a direct brain-to-brain connection between dissimilar species would involve a communications gap—but at least this novel isn’t about how wonderful or inevitable such bonds are. Not primarily, at any rate. Telepathic bonds with animals do seem awesome, but the plot is focused elsewhere.
The City of the Sun by Brian Stableford (1978)
The starship Daedalus surveys Arcadia to determine if the human colony on that alien world survived a century of isolation or if, like most of the colonies, it collapsed in the face of alien conditions. Arcadian humans did survive, thanks to a feature of the local ecology that was overlooked prior to colonization. Moreover, the colonists now enjoy an unexpectedly close relationship with the animals around them. Whether the result still counts as human is an open question.
This is a spoiler, so skip down to the next section if you want to avoid it… The local feature is an invasive fungus that every animal carries. Among its interesting properties is the ability to record and transfer information such as memories. Functionally, the fungus provides the network for a collective mind, to which human intelligence is a welcome addition. Whether this development is good or bad is rather ambiguous.
A Deeper Sea by Alexander Jablokov (1992)
Colonel Ilya Sergeiivich Stasov deciphers cetacean languages using intense research and also by torturing dolphins and their relatives until the sea creatures break three thousand years of silence. The unfortunate beasts are then drafted into Russia’s war with Japan and its allies, a development that proves less than ideal along a number of axes, before playing a key role in SETI… another development that is less than ideal.
Jablokov’s dolphins are a rather unpleasant lot, and only some of that is due to the trying circumstances in which they find themselves.
Applied research might seem an unsexy option for introducing inter-species communication, but it does have the advantage of being a lot more plausible than “telepathy,” “a very convenient fungus,” or “somehow”5. However, I must ask my readers not to take this book as a hint that torture might be scientifically productive.
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (2020)
Outback wildlife park guide Jean gains the ability to converse with animals the same way millions of other humans did, thanks to a novel and extremely contagious superflu with an unprecedented cognitive side effect. While zoanthropathy (or “Zooflu”) doesn’t provide ambiguity-free communication between species, it does make it far more difficult to ignore the gap between what animals are and what humans would like them to be.
This is just the sort of distraction one does not want while searching for a missing granddaughter.
Society basically falls apart as soon as zoanthropathy spreads. I am not sure why it does. I did like the detail that with the communications barrier greatly reduced, a lot of what animals have to say sounds like noisy (often hostile) gibberish. It’s difficult to convey concepts one does not have in common.
Would it be better if humans could talk to animals? Might it not be worse?6 Or would it do little? No doubt you have your own conclusions, for further discussion in the comments below.
- Except in the case of my late cat Eddie, who didn’t really do body language. He maintained the same amiable demeanor whether he was thinking about head-bonking other cats, working out how to channel surf by messing with radio buttons, or contemplating waking me by lifting me by my left eyelid. ↩︎
- I remain skeptical of one owner’s claim that their dog sank its teeth into my calf because it really liked me… except perhaps in a culinary sense. ↩︎
- “Oh, good! The raised tail means that skunk is happy!” is not a sentence you want to hear from anyone standing next to you. ↩︎
- Which as all DC Comics fans know is how Black Condor learned to fly like a condor. Do not try this at home. Or at the peak of a mountain. ↩︎
- Some animals do a convincing job of seemingly learning to speak. Consider this angry cockatoo. ↩︎
- I suspect that many farm animals would see the ability to ask not to be eaten as a plus. ↩︎
In Vǫlsunga Saga, Sigurð the dragon-slayer acquires the ability to understand birds after tasting Fafnir’s blood, which leads him to kill his treacherous foster-father, then seduce and abandon Brynhild, ultimately leading to his ignominious murder in bed. So I’m not sure bird-advice is 100% useful, based on this no-doubt-accurate account.
Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle, star of several volumes beginning with 1920’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle, became an animal communicator after being taught the languages of (some) animals by his parrot Polynesia. By the time the story begins, he is fluent enough to communicate with parrots, pigs, dogs, monkeys, owls, ducks, and working-class people.
The later books got positively hardish science fictional with the good doctor’s foray into insect and plant communication.
Not to mention the Doctor’s travels to the Moon!
Of course, there’s Mary Poppins, who seems to understand everything Andrew, a dog, barks. (Both book and movie.)
On the other end of the spectrum, the pigs in Animal Farm seem to be able to communicate successfully with humans, at least at the end of the book.
Also from Mary Poppins, in “John and Barbara’s Story” we learn that all babies can talk to animals (and to the sunshine, the wind, etc.), but they all forget, about when they turn one. Except for Mary Poppins…
In Eric Linklater’s novel The Wind on the Moon, the protagonists spend some time in a zoo after a shapeshifting prank goes wrong. They find that all the animals can speak to each other, and they retain this universal communication after escaping and resuming human form. Very useful!
There’s a very entertaining subplot in Superluminal by Vonda McIntyre that involves a lot of talking to whales. And how could I mention whales and not mention Fluke by Christopher Moore, but to say anything else would be spoilers for that one so…
The chokehold Tamora Pierce’s Immortals series had on me at age 12 cannot be overstated.
Penelope by William C. Anderson (1963) is about a US Navy attempt to communicate with dolphins. It’s a VERY long time since I’ve read it (some time around 1970, I think) but as I remember it the dolphin (Penelope) turn out to be (a) not at all interested in getting involved in wars and (b) an inveterate romantic, who decides that she really needs to push her (male and female) trainers into getting together, mostly by ripping their swimsuits and trunks when they’re in the water. True love conquers all in the end.
There’s a neat little 1963 Damon Knight short story, “Second-Class Citizen”, about human-dolphin communication.
The other dolphin story that comes to mind is Clarke’s Dolphin Island, a juvenile in which a runaway boy who hitches an illicit ride on a hover-freighter and is rescued by dolphins after it sinks turns out to be the key to solving the problem of communicating with cetaceans (not only dolphins – they also experiment on killer whales and sperm whales). This is one where they science the hell out of it, using computers etc, to gradually crack the languages. Not as romantic as some of the other stories here, but possibly more plausible.
You might also want to look at Diane Duane’s Deep Wizardry, in the Young Wizards series, which a couple of human magic users volunteer to help out with a cetacean magical ritual, without doing enough research about the nature of the ritual and the safety of its participants…
My favorite story about conversing with animals! I was concerned with its absence from James’s five, but scrolling down into the comments showed me that good old erudite and reliable Marcus had pointed it out. And on Arthur C. Clarke’s [counts on fingers] 108th birthday, too!
In 1964 Dolphin Island sprang, as did other contemporary fiction, from John C. Lilly’s much-publicized work on dolphin intelligence, which held out the hope of understanding their language one day. Catnip for pop-science writers, and for Ivan Tors (Flipper) , attractions such as Sea World, Larry Niven (World of Ptavvs), Robert Merle and, later, Mike Nichols (Day of the Dolphin) and many more.
Now we’re in the 21st Century. I’ve seen jetpacks fly, and regularly use a videophone. But I’m still waiting for dolphins to talk.
In most of Diane Duane’s non-licensed work, there is a magical “true speech” that allows communication between species, and it turns out that most cetaceans and all cats speak it as well. The cats may not feel like talking to you, though.
In T. Kingfisher’s Minor Mage, the title character can talk to animals. He befriends a couple of pigs who often helpfully suggest he just kill whoever is causing his current problem, and they will gladly dispose of the body. Pig advice is probably less healthy to follow than bird advice.
More specifically, in the Young Wizards/Feline Wizards continuity, the Speech is comprehended by everything, animate or inanimate, because it’s the language in which the universe was created (though everything in Duane’s universe is at least slightly animate in the sense of having a soul). There is nothing that doesn’t understand the Speech, though most non-wizards of any species can’t speak it (they hear it as their own language). Cats have their own language, Ailurin, and cetaceans and other species do as well; but the Speech is the ur-language underlying them all and the foundation of wizardry.
The character Hettar, from The Belgariad, could talk to horses, iirc.
The dolphins, chimps, and gorillas from David Brin’s Uplift series come to mind.
And a short story: “Desertion”, by Clifford Simak. Wonderful story :)
Hello, Hello by Seanan McGuire and Ted Chiang’s The Great Silence suggest that we’re just not listening hard enough
In Scalzi’s “Starter Villain” the cats communicate with humans through keyboards, they’re middle management. The book also has talking dolphins who are Marxists and cuss like sailors.
In Alan Dean Foster’s “Sentenced To Prism” the silicon based life forms communicate via radio and direct connection and it turns out that humans have a “plug” that the locals can connect with…
I have read 2 of the 5, “The Jungle Book” by Rudyard Kipling and “Daybreak—2250 A.D.” by Andre Norton. Both awesome books.
The are many, many books to add to this list, especially if one includes the shape changing humans books.
1. “Ariel” by Steven R. Boyett
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441017940
2. “The Zero Stone” by Andre Norton
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451451627
3. “Dragonflight: Volume 1 in the Dragonriders of Pern” by Anne McCaffrey
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345484266
4. “Heirs of Empire” by David Weber
https://www.amazon.com/Heirs-Empire-Dahak-David-1996-03-01/dp/B01FIXYQ2G
5. “Vic And Blood: The Continuing Adventures Of A Boy And His Dog” by Harlan Ellison
https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Blood-Continuing-Adventures-Boy/dp/0743459032
David Brin’s _Uplift_ books feature dolphins and chimps uplifted to understand human speech, but some of the humans also understand at least some dolphin languages, IIRC, although maybe not the un-uplifted variant. It’s been a while.
Also, @deeh, yes to anything Pierce writes for me!
Yes, one of the human characters has to resort at one point to whistling an entire nursery rhyme in dolphin language to make himself heard in a fracas.
There’s also a plot point that while cetaceans already had languages, it’s socially unacceptable for cetaceans to speak only their languages as adults because decompensating cetaceans lose human speech along with emotional regulation and complex decision making.
All of the above is per my faded memory.
Erin Bow’s ‘Plain Kate’ features a talking cat named Taggle. It is not a happy book, but Taggle is a bright spot. (Up to a point, anyway.)
Apropos of The Animals In That Country, an episode of Dexter’s Lab is about Dexter teaching a Golden Retriever to talk. So instead of saying “Bark! Bark! Bark!” the dog says “There’s a thing! There’s a thing! There’s a thing!” and can’t explain further.
“Old MacDonald Had a Farm” is a story by Mike Resnick about an animal that is genetically created solely to be a food source. Everything about it was designed to make it perfect meat animal. An unfortunate side effect is that they can speak, and are about as intelligent as a 3-4 year old. One of them says to the narrator, “Please don’t eat me.”
Douglas Adams avoided that problem in the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, where the genetically engineered food animal comes to the table, asks how the diners would like it prepared, and takes offense when they don’t want to eat an intelligent being.
Andre Norton wrote three more novels featuring humans in telepathic communication with animals: “Catseye” and the duology “The Beast Master” and “Lord of Thunder.”
C J Cherryh’s Finisterre books are a gleeful deconstruction of the magic telepathic pony trope.
Saki’s “Tobermory” is an early cautionary tale, concerning why it might be a bad idea to teach a house cat to understand and speak English.
RE Example 1 – the animated version of “The Jungle Book” has even less scientific credibility. It’s difficult to believe that animals in 19th Century India could have an affinity for American trad Jazz.
A James Schmitz character, Telzey Amberdon, is a telepath and xenopath. One of those aliens she can communicate with is from a large cat-like species. Baen has a collection or two with stories of her. and their, adventures.
In the possibly dubious interest of pedantry, my recollection is that in The Jungle Book the animals speak different languages, but Mowgli learns all of them from his ursine tutor. His ability to speak to different species is a plot point at least once.
“a lot of what animals have to say sounds like noisy (often hostile) gibberish.”
Like birdsong, which despite sounding pleasant o human ears, is a declaration of sexual prowess and a warning of violence to be done should you trespass