Pinoy Kasi -- Bowlingual (October 2, 2003)

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02 October 2003

Bow, bow wow, bow

Bowlingual - the dog language translator

I'M looking forward to the announcements Thursday by a group at Harvard University of the 2003 IgNoble Awards, given to research findings that "cannot or should not be reproduced."

Last year's IgNoble Peace Prize went to the Bowlingual, a Japanese invention, for promoting harmony between humans and dogs. The gadget supposedly records your dog's barking and gives you a translation to tell you if your pet is hungry, happy, sad, angry or wants to play.

Bowlingual was invented by Masahiko Kajita, who it turns out, hates dogs because as a child he was once bitten by a dog. Obsessed with the need to explore the canine mind, he finally bought a dog of his own and studied its barking and eventually developed Bowlingual. He says that before he started working on Bowlingual, he used to think that dogs barked at him because they "hated" him. After his work on the device, he realized that quite often the barking was actually friendly.

Several thousand Bowlinguals have been sold, prompting the manufacturers to launch a new gadget. You guessed it: the Meowlingual.

I don't know if the Meowlingual will get an IgNoble Peace Prize, but I'd be curious to see if we can move from kitty cats to the big cats, as in lions. After all, many years ago the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him."

Wittgenstein's observation is considered one of his most profound insights and is often quoted. What this great thinker was pointing out is that animals and humans have such different life experiences, literally living in such different worlds, so that if a lion could talk (maybe even in Filipino), we wouldn't make sense of what he or she is saying.

Humans have always been intrigued by the possibilities that we can communicate with the rest of the animal kingdom. Many of us talk all the time to our animals, especially to our pets. I will admit that I do, with dogs, cats, turtles, even with fish.

While we poke fun at gadgets like Bowlingual and Meowlingual, we are also intrigued, wondering if they work, and if they might allow us not just to talk to animals but also to carry on a conversation with them.

Many cultures have stories of humans, usually placed in the mythical past, who didn't just talk to animals but with them. Oct. 4 is the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, who was said to have this gift. In our own times, we have the story (with two movie versions) of Dr. Doolittle, the vet who could talk with animals.

This interest in talking to, or with animals, reflects the radical transformation in the way we look at animals. Until fairly recently, our view of animals, and much of nature, was that they were there to be dominated by humans. Such ideas, especially strong in the Judeo-Christian tradition, often translated into a disregard for the environment and great cruelty to animals.

But amid that atrocious behavior, humans have also demonstrated the capability to care for species other than our own, even ready to give our lives for them. The transformation in attitudes has moved slowly, away from the idea of dominating nature. One reason for this transformation is that we domesticated certain animals. With particular animal species, which we now call pets, the process was probably more of them domesticating us, convincing us to share our homes with them, maybe in some cases letting them take over our lives.

These close relationships with our companion animals, plus the results of the many studies of animal behavior, are beginning to make us wonder if consciousness, intelligence and even culture are exclusive domains of humans. Drawing from Wittgenstein, we might want to consider the possibilities that we've thought of animals as without intelligence only because they have worlds that we couldn't understand.

Couldn't, or didn't want to. Entertaining the possibility that animals may have "minds" makes humans uneasy, challenging our presumed superiority. Last week, I featured one study that looked into the notion of "fairness" among capuchin monkeys. Just two weeks ago, British scientists wrote in a journal that fish are not the "dim-witted peabrains" we think them to be. Instead, the scientists are convinced that fish are "steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation, exhibiting stable cultural traditions, and co-operating to inspect predators and catch food."

There are, of course, pragmatic reasons for all this research. Perhaps our curiosity about animal behavior is really based on a hunch that their worlds, their minds, might offer clues about what it means to be human. Let's face it, whenever we are amused, saddened or touched by animals, it is because we see ourselves in them. All these interactions just might make us humbler in the way we look at our place in the universe.

There must be something to that passage in the Old Testament, in Job 12:7-10: "Ask the birds, ask the beasts, and they will teach you."

Saint Francis' feast day is an occasion for some churches to offer blessings of animals. There will be one at the EDSA Shrine this Saturday. Registration starts at 11 a.m.

The Malate church on M. H. del Pilar Street in Manila will also have a blessing of animals after the Mass at noon on Sunday, Oct. 5.