Books reading recommendations Five Books About Conversing With Animals How great would it be to talk with animals, through magic or technology or… whatever? By James Davis Nicoll | Published on December 16, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We all understand that humans and animals cannot easily communicate with each other. Most animals find it hard to understand human speech (though some commands and phrases can be learned); we often find their body language (the product of millions of years of divergent evolution) opaque1; and their handwriting is appalling (though some can push buttons). Even dogs, animals that have lived with and been shaped by humans—and have shaped humans in return—for a very long time, can be hard to understand. Bad luck for any Timmies stuck down a well. Humans often think that they are capable of understanding what an animal understands or wants, or that they have communicated clearly, but they can be mistaken2. How sure can you be that the animal understood you, or you them3? It would be so convenient if there were some shortcut to bridging the gaps… Some way to tell the cat that no, he cannot scratch the sofa, to explain to the dog that you do not want a well-aged dead gopher, or to convince the local ravens that you are not their enemy. This common human wish makes for an engaging plot premise. An ability to converse with animals (magically or technically or somehow conferred) turns up in book after book. Such as the following. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (1894) Mowgli learns the language of the animals by the simple expedient of having been orphaned and then adopted and raised by wolves4. Conveniently for Mowgli, for the most part all animals speak the same language. This is not an unmixed blessing, as not everything animals say is something one wants to hear. To be honest, I am pretty skeptical about many details of Kipling’s zoology. Dogs and cats are often baffled by the other’s body language. Canid and feline lineages diverged comparatively recently. Imagine the gulf between the snake Kaa and primate Mowgli. I don’t think that there is any fieldwork that supports the notion of a unified spoken language among animals. It’s almost as though The Jungle Book is not intended as a serious scientific hypothesis. Daybreak—2250 A.D. by Andre Norton (1954) Silver-haired Fors of the Puma Clan of the hidden city Eyrie is both victim of and beneficiary of the lingering radiation of the atomic war that was civilization’s final triumph. His visible deviation from local physiological norms makes him an outcast, but at least he is accompanied in his travels by his giant semi-telepathic cat Lura. Honestly, the frequent existence of telepathic bonds with animals in the works of Andre Norton probably deserves its own essay. It feels like a bit of a cheat—surely, even a direct brain-to-brain connection between dissimilar species would involve a communications gap—but at least this novel isn’t about how wonderful or inevitable such bonds are. Not primarily, at any rate. Telepathic bonds with animals do seem awesome, but the plot is focused elsewhere. The City of the Sun by Brian Stableford (1978) The starship Daedalus surveys Arcadia to determine if the human colony on that alien world survived a century of isolation or if, like most of the colonies, it collapsed in the face of alien conditions. Arcadian humans did survive, thanks to a feature of the local ecology that was overlooked prior to colonization. Moreover, the colonists now enjoy an unexpectedly close relationship with the animals around them. Whether the result still counts as human is an open question. This is a spoiler, so skip down to the next section if you want to avoid it… The local feature is an invasive fungus that every animal carries. Among its interesting properties is the ability to record and transfer information such as memories. Functionally, the fungus provides the network for a collective mind, to which human intelligence is a welcome addition. Whether this development is good or bad is rather ambiguous. A Deeper Sea by Alexander Jablokov (1992) Colonel Ilya Sergeiivich Stasov deciphers cetacean languages using intense research and also by torturing dolphins and their relatives until the sea creatures break three thousand years of silence. The unfortunate beasts are then drafted into Russia’s war with Japan and its allies, a development that proves less than ideal along a number of axes, before playing a key role in SETI… another development that is less than ideal. Jablokov’s dolphins are a rather unpleasant lot, and only some of that is due to the trying circumstances in which they find themselves. Applied research might seem an unsexy option for introducing inter-species communication, but it does have the advantage of being a lot more plausible than “telepathy,” “a very convenient fungus,” or “somehow”5. However, I must ask my readers not to take this book as a hint that torture might be scientifically productive. The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (2020) Outback wildlife park guide Jean gains the ability to converse with animals the same way millions of other humans did, thanks to a novel and extremely contagious superflu with an unprecedented cognitive side effect. While zoanthropathy (or “Zooflu”) doesn’t provide ambiguity-free communication between species, it does make it far more difficult to ignore the gap between what animals are and what humans would like them to be. This is just the sort of distraction one does not want while searching for a missing granddaughter. Society basically falls apart as soon as zoanthropathy spreads. I am not sure why it does. I did like the detail that with the communications barrier greatly reduced, a lot of what animals have to say sounds like noisy (often hostile) gibberish. It’s difficult to convey concepts one does not have in common. Would it be better if humans could talk to animals? Might it not be worse?6 Or would it do little? No doubt you have your own conclusions, for further discussion in the comments below.[end-mark] Except in the case of my late cat Eddie, who didn’t really do body language. He maintained the same amiable demeanor whether he was thinking about head-bonking other cats, working out how to channel surf by messing with radio buttons, or contemplating waking me by lifting me by my left eyelid. ︎I remain skeptical of one owner’s claim that their dog sank its teeth into my calf because it really liked me… except perhaps in a culinary sense. ︎“Oh, good! The raised tail means that skunk is happy!” is not a sentence you want to hear from anyone standing next to you. ︎Which as all DC Comics fans know is how Black Condor learned to fly like a condor. Do not try this at home. Or at the peak of a mountain. ︎Some animals do a convincing job of seemingly learning to speak. Consider this angry cockatoo. ︎I suspect that many farm animals would see the ability to ask not to be eaten as a plus. ︎The post Five Books About Conversing With Animals appeared first on Reactor.