So scientists have been catching up with pet owners of the last few millennia (maybe the last few tens of millennia) and learning that it is possible to communicate with non-humans ...
Actually, that’s a little unfair: scientists have actually been working out how to perform two way communication with wild animals, as well as pets - see here. This is not something new - animal behaviour has been studied methodically (“scientifically”) for decades, and some primates have been taught hand signals for communication - which is something they do in the wild anyway.
Delving back in to the world of pets, buttons for communicating have become more widely used (see here, here, and here), and I consider should be universal for all suitable pets (and I consider all cats should be permanently indoors).
So the issue is not whether animals can communicate: they do - both domestic and wild animals.
Similarly, the issue is not communication with domesticated animals (I’ve seen videos of birds talking where they are using variants of words that convey the same meaning - and sometimes the trainer doesn’t catch on to that), but definable communication with wild animals - and, dare I say it, with animals used in farming.
And this is where the article I started this post with raises a couple of issues:
- “Anthropocene centrism” ... the idea that the only interactions that matter are human - which also gets into communication that humans are simply unaware of, such as infra- or ultra-sound (the article is quite eloquent on this aspect); and
- ethics - including the possible weaponisation of this technology (and the US military “has form” on militarised use of animals - see here, here, here, here, and here), and the ethics of killing sentient beings for food.
Hello? Vegan here - we've been around for some time now - vegetarianism has been for millennia, and some of those early vegetarians sounded suspiciously like vegans.
On that topic I will say: scientists have been catching up ... I hope!!!
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Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.
