Even though some consider the ability to communicate verbally as evidence of our species superiority, sometimes our words don’t communicate all that well. Like members of multiple species, we may have our own languages or dialects that others can’t understand. What sounds like sweet music to our ears, may cause others of our species to cringe. Or we may assign different meanings to the same word, and sometimes quite different meanings at that. Just as sometimes we have no idea what the call of a bird or muttering of a bear means, sometimes the meaning behind what we read or hear another person say strikes us as equally meaningless.
Years ago cartoonist Gary Larson drew a cartoon that depicted what we say to dogs and what dogs hear. On the human half of the cartoon, there was a person going on and on to a dog named Ginger, and on the canine half was “Blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah.”
While all of us surely have listened to people who gave us the blah-blah-Ginger feeling, can you imagine what this must be like for our animals?
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