Everybody knows dogs can talk. ‘Splosh’ when a tongue comes at the unearthly hour of 6.00 in the morning, insisting it’s time to go for a walk. Or when a ‘whooo’ announces that she’s starving. Or when a wag knocks over that figurine.
Animals can talk. But most believe that a ‘bow wow’ or paw is the limit of conversation. That’s not true.

Mind Talking
28th August 03, I take our dog Buffy for a walk. Celia, my wife, who refuses to wake up before 9.00 stays at home. When we returned, Celia asked Buffy who she had seen. “A white dog” she told Celia. Bang on. We had seen a white Pomeranian that doesn’t normally visit our neighbourhood. Now, this is not an isolated instance. For more than half a year, we have consistently used the walk to confirm the dog-(wo)man conversation.

Cows, the number of dogs, boxers in cars, girls with red t-shirts, the places Buffy makes Ka-Ka… the sheer number of instances and details are overwhelming. There have been instances when the details have been vague, uncertain, distorted. But roughly only one when what Buffy has told us has been completely divergent from fact. Once, on the walk she smelt a strange red substance that terrified her. Later she told Celia that she had smelt the spilt blood of a doggy friend, who arrived hale and hearty shortly after.

Talking to animals can lead to some interesting snippets. Celia asked a friend’s dog whether he was happy. “Yes”, he replied except for one thing, he wasn’t allowed to eat some brown square thing. What was that, we asked the friend. Well it was no biscuits for the dog – since he was such a hog!

History sez, it’s not new
While today it appears fairly unusual, animal talk has been recorded many times in distant and contemporary history.
In the book Communicating with Animals
, the author Art Meyers, relates how a pup’s owner had asked animal communicator, Kate Reilly to speak to the dog, to get to know it better. The telepathic conversation with the pup, revealed that the seemingly healthy pup actually had a disease of the joints, something an x-ray at the vets later confirmed.

Lydia Hiby is another well recorded animal communicator, who works principally in U.S. and Europe. In fact she was encouraged to write about her experiences by her co-author, Bonnie S. Weintraub. A skeptic who did an about face, when Lydia helped save his dog when it faced a life-threatening situation.

Recently, Maneka Gandhi related in the Indian Express about her encounter with an animal communicator.

In the book Mutant Turtle Down Under the author relates how she learned the aboriginal way to draw animals towards one. From across the world, be it Borneo, Hawaii or Brazil, hunters have been known to use mind-speak to hunt animals.

Crime-busters
Talking to animals can be useful. For example, a psychic in the USA has been known to talk to animals to help give police clues to solve crimes!
Most instances of animal communication deal with being able to deal better with animals and solve problems. One moving instance related by an owner speaks of how she was talked out of committing suicide by her two cats, who essentially asked ‘what about us?’

Our own experience confirms animal-talk’s usefulness. The other day Buffy came down limping from the terrace in great pain. ‘Had she broken it? Had she hit something?’ we asked. “Something bite me,” she told us. We went to the terrace, and found a half squashed bee. We cancelled the vet’s appointment. An hour later, she was prancing around.

Survivors of calamities like earthquakes often speak of how animals sometimes try to warn owners of impending disaster.

One of the strangest recorded instances of animal talk must be the case of Missie, a Boston terrier who could see into the future. According to author Bill Schul, who examined the case, Missie predicted accurately the outcome of the presidential election in the 6o’s! In another instance she predicted the sex, date of birth and weight of a baby.

It can be useful…but…
In a Sherlock Holmes story, the dog that didn’t bark spoke volumes. By converse, Dear Mr Holmes, the dog that talks can equally hold possibilities of solving crime, snooping around… However, in our own experience dog-witnessing has clear limits.

For, not everything that animals tell us is the gospel truth. For example, we asked Buffy if we could feed a street dog with extra bones. “Oh no!” said Buffy, “Tiger doesn’t like chicken at all.” And how did she know? “Tiger told me,” came the glib lie. More importantly, for humans, seeing is believing. Our evidence is most strongly visual. Other animals don’t share our sensory orientation. For example in October, Buffy told Celia that she had met three dogs on the walk. Bruno, Ghoda and Midgie. While Buffy and I had met the first two we hadn’t met the third.
On further reflection, I realised that what we had met was Midgie’s owner whom Buffy had smelt Midgie on. Yes, she had met Midgie. But not in our terms of reference.

Second, violence of any kind has a disruptive effect on the inner conversation. The instinctive patterns appear to let the imagination go into overdrive.
Any doggy and perhaps anybody can do it.

While we humans are more tuned in to dogs, we can mind-talk to practically every species. Our other animal conversations have included crows, squirrels, cows, cats, snakes, insects, viruses, cockroaches, butterflies, ants, dolphins… One of the most disturbing contacts with other species for us has been with rats. Where the experience of mind-merge leaves one with a strange creepy-crawly feeling. The feeling is probably mutual considering what one has in store for them.

The greatest gift animal talk offers is a humbling one. It shoves us humans off a pedestal, we have in our post renaissance history believed we occupied. There are many times when Buffy says she can’t tell us things about scents because we simply wouldn’t understand!

The fact is not only can animals talk but in many instances have wisdom far deeper than ours. Roughly a decade ago, a dolphin gave me a healing and psychic symbol of such tremendous power that it forms the cornerstone of our meditation classes.

In a recent interview, Jane Goodall, the famed animal researcher, proposed that chimps are spiritual – from her observation they seem to yearn, praise, perhaps even pray!

Now while this may seem heretical to the physicalist, ‘ho hum’ say the more religiously inclined pointing out that the legendary sage, Dattareya had a host of animals as gurus! Besides, virtually every pantheistic religion has had animal god forms. Indicative of the knowledge that animals far from being below us, are equal in spirit, and perhaps in some ways even superior.

Philosopher haryali kebab anyone?
“Hey hang on don’t bite into the tangdi kebab, is it a great earth philosopher or scientist?” Did we hear a smirky, sarcastic objection? Valid point. For if animals are not just technically alive, but even superior in many ways to us then does one have the right to eat them?

Struggling with this question, I, coming from a Syrian Christian family that has to have meat twice a day, have turned vegetarian. (Not that this is anything but a compromise solution, for I have talked to trees too.)
Recently we posed the question to Buffy. For she had one day informed us that all food comes from the red box – translation; fridge. Did she know chickens had to be killed to give her food? And if so was it OK? Her answer was that if we didn’t kill it for her, she could do it for herself. To which we asked her that if it was OK to kill chickens, what if someone came and killed her? She gave us a child’s reply, “you will stop them”.

Another perspective on this came from a dead cricket. On seeing a cat kill a cricket and snack on it, Chayanth a 11 year old reiki healer wanted to intervene, his mom told him “no”. We assured him that in the natural dance of life the prey doesn’t resent being killed. How did we know? Chayanth wondered. Good question. We took him through a specific process that allows one to talk to beings that have died. The cricket’s enigmatic reply was, “I am not dead”.

How to start a dialogue?
Those who are dying to try this out are no doubt asking themselves, ‘is there any special technique that we use?’ Frankly, the only one we believe is of any real use is openness. Talk to the animal with the belief it can understand. Then listen. The process of talking to animals in our observation involves a wordless mind-speak which is retranslated at a level slightly higher than the usual egoic one. For example in the rare instances that Buffy talks to me the vocabulary is far larger than the one she uses with Celia. This I suspect is because Celia believes Buffy’s verbal abilities are more limited, this belief acts like an inner filter. By converse I believe the greater the human verbal interpretation given to the stream of inner-speak the more distortive the channel.

Not all animals like to talk to humans. Some prefer to reply by more emotionally-sophisticated modes like cuddling closer. Cats often react to voices in their heads by suddenly letting rip with their claws. But largely the issue tends to be that most often we have little to say to each other. Imagine yourself having a conversation with a being you believe is sometimes as sadistic as an SS Guard. What would you say to someone who says he would like to talk to you, but is scared that if you reply he has ghosts in his head?

Animals can talk. Maybe it’s time for mankind to listen. For our own good.

(However, there is a rider, like any other language animal-talk may take years to pickup. And if in the interim relatives cart you off to a padded cell, don’t blame us.)