I realize that this blog is late in terms of being posted. I feel though that my time was spent in better ways filling out an application form to adopt a dog from Austin Pets Alive! Wish me luck that Bear and I will have a great meeting that will lead into a lifelong friendship. So tomorrow is a new day.
I have always thought that people who said animals can’t speak were less of a person for saying such. Though we cannot understand the direct meaning of a dogs bark, or the whistle from a pet bird, their emotion can come through if you listen with your heart and not your ears. “They speak to us, and we to them. In how many several sorts of ways do we speak to our dogs, and they answer us?” (836) When time is spent with an animal, communication can transverse spoken words. Being a communication major I learned a long time ago that 97% of the act of communicating is non-verbal, and 3% being the actual words used. Of that 97% a large portion is the tonality of the voice (rate, pitch, depth) and the rest with gestures, gaze, and facial expressions. So of course animals can tell when we are upset with them, and when we are happy or sad. The problem is most of us don’t see things the other way around. We don’t take the time to see that animals do express their emotions, and if we paid attention we could read their non-verbal’s. It is easy to see when a dog is happy when he wags his tail. It is also very apparent the suffering animals express when they are treated with a cruel hand. People that take a cruel approach to handling animals (and that is what they do, handle) are past the point to realize the emotional connection that can be made with that animal. In the 1700s, “wide diffusion of biological notions…gave birth to a conventional, almost fashionable, mode of sentimental commiseration with the sufferings of animals.” (804)
John Berger writes in Why Look at Animals about this concept. “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionships which is different from any offered by human enhance. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species. Such an unspeaking companionship was felt to be so equal that often one find the conviction that it was man who lacked the capacity to speak with animals—hence the stories and legends of exceptional beings, like Orpheus, who could talk with animals in their own language.” (796)
2. Orpheus
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