On February 22, 1970, Bamboo Harvester, known professionally as Mister Ed, died after a distinguished career in television and interspecies communication. He was 21.

 

For six seasons, Mister Ed demonstrated an ability that had eluded every horse before him and every horse since. He could talk. His closest human associate, architect Wilbur Post, was generally the only person permitted to hear him do it, creating considerable difficulty for Wilbur and considerable amusement for millions of television viewers.

 

Bamboo Harvester supplied the face. Former Western actor Allan “Rocky” Lane supplied Ed’s speaking voice. The credits maintained the fiction: Mister Ed played himself.

 

If you were around then, you probably remember what came next.

 

♪ Listen to the Mister Ed theme

More than half a century later, however, Mister Ed may have left us with a question worth reconsidering.

 

Scientists are studying animal communication with tools that would have sounded like science fiction when Wilbur first leaned over a stable door to talk with his palomino confidant. Artificial intelligence can examine enormous collections of sounds and behavior, searching for patterns human ears and eyes may miss. Researchers are studying canine vocalizations, the gestures animals use to direct our attention, and even dogs that press buttons associated with words. Nobody has built Mister Ed. But we may be getting better at listening.

 

Anyone who has shared a home with a dog or cat may wonder what took us so long. You know the look. Your dog glances at you, then at the door, then back at you. The meaning is not especially mysterious. A cat sits beside an empty food dish and produces a sound somehow reserved for the incompetence of humans. Another pet becomes unusually attentive when you are sick or distressed. Some seem to know we are leaving before the suitcase comes out.

 

Dog people will tell you their dogs understand them. Cat people will tell you their cats understand them perfectly well and reserve the right not to respond.

 

Science uses more cautious language, but the evidence increasingly confirms something pet owners have understood intuitively: communication is occurring in both directions. Dogs pay attention to our pointing, gaze and tone. Cats use vocalizations, gaze and movement to get our attention. We learn their signals, and they learn ours. Over years together, you and your pet can develop a private vocabulary that neither of you could easily explain to anyone else.

 

None of this means there is an English sentence hidden inside a bark or a meow waiting for a computer to translate it. Communication is not the same thing as human language. But something has been passing between us all along.

 

For many people, that exchange becomes something deeper. A dog or cat may be beside you through children leaving home, retirement, illness, loss or years of living alone. She knows your routines and moods. You learn her pleasures, fears and peculiarities. Somewhere along the way, the word pet can begin to seem inadequate.

 

Perhaps what people describe as a spiritual connection with an animal begins precisely where language ends.

 

The Other End of the Leash

For a long time, however, we were more concerned with getting our pets to understand us than with understanding them. Those who grew up in Mister Ed’s era may remember a very different philosophy of pet ownership. A dog was expected to obey. Training often meant correction: a jerk on the leash, a choke collar, a stern “Bad dog,” perhaps even the rolled-up newspaper that became almost a symbol of housebreaking. The object was largely to teach your dog what you wanted him to do.

 

We know more now. Veterinary behavior specialists generally recommend reward-based training rather than methods that depend on pain, fear or physical punishment. But something larger changed along with the training methods. We began paying closer attention to what our dogs were telling us.

 

Your dog watches you closely. He follows where you point. He notices where you are looking and responds to your tone of voice. He learns the routines of your household and can become remarkably good at anticipating what happens next. Researchers have devised experiments to measure these abilities, including fitting dogs with mobile eye-tracking equipment to see exactly where they look when a person tries to direct their attention.

 

Cats complicate the research, as cats tend to do. They also respond to human signals, although they have sometimes proved less willing than dogs to cooperate with researchers. In one study comparing dogs and cats on their ability to follow human pointing, the cats were less likely even to make a choice. They did somewhat better when tested in their own homes.

 

Cat owners may regard this less as a scientific finding than confirmation of something they already knew.

 

The larger change is easy to miss. In Wilbur Post’s day, a well-trained dog was one that understood his owner. Increasingly, we have begun asking how well the owner understands the dog.

 

Technology may soon make that question considerably more interesting. Artificial intelligence is particularly good at finding patterns in large amounts of information. Give a system thousands of barks, whines, movements and situations, and it can search for similarities that a human observer might miss. Researchers are already using machine learning to study animal vocalizations and behavior.

 

But the interesting possibility is not a machine that hears a bark and announces, “Your dog says he is hungry.” There probably isn’t an English sentence hidden inside the sound waiting to be decoded.

 

Imagine instead that your dog begins whining near the back door. A future system might consider the sound he made, where he was looking, his posture and movement, what he had been doing during the previous hour and whether this behavior was unusual for him. A collar or other sensor could add information about his activity or physical condition.

 

The result might look less like a translation and more like this:

 

High confidence: Wants your attention.
Probable referent: Back door.
Unusual behavior: Third request within 20 minutes.
Possible concern: Discomfort.

 

That is considerably less entertaining than Mister Ed telling Wilbur what he thinks of the neighbors.

 

It could also be considerably more useful.

 

If Mister Ed Could Talk

If Mister Ed really could talk, what would we want to know? Probably not whether Wilbur should buy a new car or what Ed thought of the neighbors. We might ask questions the television writers rarely bothered with. Are you frightened? Are you in pain? Do you miss someone when she leaves? What makes you happy? Do you understand more of what we say than we realize?

 

And perhaps the most interesting question would be the simplest: What have you been trying to tell us all this time?

 

Some of the answers might be wonderfully ordinary. Your dog wants to go outside. Your cat would prefer that you stop touching her tail. He wants the ball that rolled under the sofa. She wants dinner and considers the fact that dinner is still twenty minutes away to be your problem, not hers.

 

Others could matter considerably more.

 

A dog who cannot tell you where he hurts can only show you that something has changed. A cat who is frightened or uncomfortable may hide, stop eating, become unusually vocal or simply behave differently. We notice these changes now, of course. People who have lived with the same pet for years can become remarkably sensitive to them. But imagine having another set of eyes watching for patterns you might miss.

 

The benefit would not flow only toward us.

 

For most of our history with domesticated animals, humans have controlled nearly every important decision: when they eat, where they go, when they are left alone, when they receive medical care, even when their lives end. Our pets communicate preferences constantly, but we decide how much of that communication we recognize.

 

Better understanding could change that relationship in ways more consequential than producing a talking dog.

 

If technology someday helps us understand more clearly what another creature wants, fears, enjoys or suffers, it may change more than our ability to communicate with animals. It may change our sense of what we owe them.

 

Of course, communication does not have to be translated into words to change us. People who live closely with dogs and cats often become students of them without realizing it. You learn that the slight change in her posture means she has had enough. You recognize the particular sound he makes when someone familiar is approaching. You know the difference between excitement and anxiety, between “leave me alone” and “please don’t leave.”

 

That kind of attention can exercise empathy. You have to notice someone whose experience is different from your own and try to understand what he needs without assuming that he experiences the world as you do.

 

Dogs, especially, seem wonderfully comfortable being dogs. Your dog wants the walk, the smell beneath the shrub, the person coming through the door, the patch of sunlight on the floor. He does not appear terribly concerned about whether he has fulfilled his potential by age seven. He does not compare his career with the Labrador across the street.

 

A cat feels no evident obligation to become a better cat by Thursday.

 

We have invented entire spiritual practices to help ourselves do some of those things: pay attention, stay in the moment, accept what we cannot control, enjoy what is in front of us and give our attention fully to another living being.

 

That doesn’t make your dog a Buddhist or your cat a mystic. It does suggest that some qualities we struggle to recover come naturally to the creatures sharing our homes.

 

For older adults, the relationship can acquire another dimension. A dog or cat may have been there through retirement, a move, illness, the death of someone you love or other changes in your life. She knows your routines. He recognizes your return. Neither needs to know what happened ten years ago to sit beside you today.

 

Perhaps that helps explain why the death of a longtime pet can hurt so much. The loss is not simply of a dog or cat we cared for. It is the loss of a companion who occupied a particular place in our daily lives and, in ways we may never completely understand, knew us.

 

Are Animals Spiritual?

Ask a devoted pet parent and they will say, “Of course they are.” But that depends on what we mean by spiritual.

 

If spirituality requires theology, an understanding of mortality or the ability to contemplate the meaning of existence, we have no basis for assigning those capacities to a dog sleeping beside the sofa or a cat watching the world from a windowsill.

 

But spirituality can mean something else. It can concern relationship, presence, trust, suffering, joy, devotion and the recognition that a life has value beyond its usefulness to us.

 

By that measure, the question becomes more interesting.

 

Perhaps the mistake is assuming that understanding another creature means discovering how much like us she is. A dog does not have to think like a human being for his fear to matter. A cat does not have to understand mortality for her attachment to be real. Respect may begin when we recognize that another creature does not have to be humanlike to possess an inner life worthy of our attention.

 

And that brings us back to the technology.

 

The most important achievement of an artificial intelligence capable of helping us understand our pets may not be that it finally teaches a dog to speak.

 

It may be that it teaches us to listen.

 

If this article speaks to you, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
 

Related spiritual themes: AI, artificial intelligence, conversation, pets and spirituality, spiritual reflection

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