I was laying in bed yesterday, enjoying the tranquillity and the warmth of the last summer days, when the gentle buzz of a moth came and ruined my peace. It made several turns in the air, some twenty centimetres right above my head, teasing me until I had to get up and shoo it away.

How nice it would be if we could actually talk to animals! I wondered, as I was back on the bed again, five minutes later, recovering from this incidence. That way, we could just tell the insects and moths: we mean no harm, but please don’t get too close to our territory, and keep several decimetres from our beds. I could tell the friendly neighbourhood spiders to move to the corner near the window, where it could be best fed by the incoming insects from the outside, while not disturbing me in my daily routines. I could tell the birds trapped in the staircases where the exit is, so that they wouldn’t need to hit the glass in vain. People could actually communicate with their pets. That sounds like an amazing idea!

But then if that is the case, how are people going to kill the animals, with whom we can communicate? How are farmers going to handle the situation, where they are sending the animals they have been talking to since their childhood to butchers? And how are butchers going to butcher the talking animals? I begin to sense there is a ration behind there being both talking and non-talking animals in Narnia. It would be very weird to domesticate, cultivate in batch and then butcher in batch the animals if people can talk to them. There will be no more Geschnetzeltes, Schnitzel, goulash, beef stroganoff, Peking duck, meat skewers, or any animal products that require animal husbandry. Pigs will say: please don’t butcher me, we had such good time together, didn’t we? Cows will say: you are pressing on my breasts too hard. That would be a really weird world.

Hunting / gathering might still work. Cannibalism is possible in human societies, so apparently people is still capable of eating animals with which they can talk and communicate. If people fish from the sea and obtain fishes that are half dead any way after being brought away from the water, they could probably bring themselves to consuming them. But raising animals and then butchering them? It would be establishing relationships with these talking animals only to kill them in the end. That is probably unseen in human history, unparalleled by cannibalism or slavery. The agriculture centred around animal meat and animal products just doesn’t work - and neither does the industry that relies on these materials.

The only option, diet wise, is probably to take up a vegan lifestyle. But if that had always been the case in human history, would our civilisation still reach its current status? How much more effort would it be for people to grow crops if they couldn’t bring themselves to enslaving cows? And what if at some point, enlightened human beings and cows decide to abolish this slavery? How much longer would it take for people to develop the agricultural technologies, without the use of talking animals? Sometimes it is just better to leave the stone unturned, better not to look under the carpet, much like it is much better and easier for people to not look at the history of slavery, colonisation, and the exploitation on the developing and under-developed countries, because these very facts undermine the entire history, and leaves the entire current situation in an unjustifiable and undefendable status.

Or maybe, from a more technically possible point of view, being able to communicate with animals does not really mean that we can talk to animals in the same way we talk to each other human beings. I began to realise this, as the more sensible part of me got the upper hand. The “languages”, if any, are certainly different! Barks, roars, gestures, and hormones - complicated as these may be, can these really contain as high bandwidth as human language? And if zoologists and biologists are correct in saying that dogs can be as smart as three-year-old children, they also mean that many other animals are not. Even if we have the technology for interfacing the different communication systems, talking to animals whose communication bandwidth is far lower than our language, and/or whose information processing speed is far lower than human beings, will be an upsetting experience. It would be like a modern desktop CPU talking directly to a vintage hard drive. Data transfer from an SSD to a floppy disk. Or, as said in Pantheon, uploaded intelligence communicating with real humans. Even the artificial intelligence nowadays, if they somehow obtain actual consciousness, must find interfacing with human an unbearable experience. If I couldn’t even tell my six-year-old nephew to stop shooting me with his toy gun, how am I supposed to tell the moths, which are orders of magnitudes less intelligent than dogs, which are less intelligent than my nephew, to understand “I mean no harm, but please don’t get too close to my bed”?

It seems to me that talking to animals, even if possible, would be fundamentally different from talking to a human being. I wouldn’t be able to easily make moths understand that I would prefer to be kept quiet, or make spiders understand constructing nets too close to my desk or bed would only result in more casualties and unnecessary destructions - both for them and for me. But hey, on the bright side, I guess it would also mean that the evolution of human civilisation would not be severely changed by whether we can talk to animals or not! There will still be Geschnetzeltes, Schnitzel, goulash, beef stroganoff, Peking duck, and meat skewers. Satisfied with this conclusion, I closed my eyes again, and fell back into the tranquil state.