Will We Ever Be Able to 'Talk' With Our Pets?
Will We Ever Be Able to 'Talk' With Our Pets? Advertisement We’re all familiar with the scene, either straight from the source or through one of thousands of parodies: Lassie bounds up to the farmhand and starts yipping; the farmhand says, “What is it, Lassie?”; Lassie keeps yipping; and eventually the farmhand deciphers, from this undifferentiated noise, some extremely specific message re: someone being trapped in a well or burning house. This fantasy of dog-human communication has, a half-century on, still not been realized: We have no real way to know what our pets are after when the...