Charles Foster in Literary Review:
If a cow said, ‘Don’t eat me’, we wouldn’t. We seem to regard the capacity for language (by which we mean our kind of language) as evidence of moral significance. But do animals talk? Many traditions assume they do, and understanding animal talk has sometimes been thought to indicate great human wisdom. The proverbially wise Solomon understood the language of the birds, and St Francis preached to them. Most of us have asked what a crow’s squawk or a dog’s whine means. Perhaps we ask because we feel that animals can tell us something we don’t know about the sort of place this world is.
For much of the last four hundred years, enquiries of this kind have been disreputable. Descartes declared that animals were automatons and Enlightenment thinkers duly reconceived the cosmos and everything in it, apart from humans, as a machine. We humans hung on to our souls for a while, but now we are machines too. The study of animal behaviour has long been merely the study of how animals react to stimuli. Ask what they were thinking and the journals would reject your article.
But things are changing, as Arik Kershenbaum’s splendid book shows.
More here.