Comment on Possibility of translating the messages of dogs, cats, and other pets
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The other pets part is more likely to be useful.
It’s not that cats and dogs aren’t vocal, they are. Cats in particular supposedly are vocal for us, but don’t use sound with each other hardly at all.
Dogs are vocal with each other, and us.
The problem is that the level of complexity involved in their sounds is not just low, but only tiny part of their overall communication. Body language is way more important with cats or dogs. They communicate with their entire body, of which vocalizations are maybe 5% of the total. A bark, as example, can mean a handful of things by itself, but to know what they’re saying, you have to see the entire dog.
Trying to translate dogs and cats off of vocalizations only would be like trying to translate English using only adverbs.
That being said, I would put maybe a teeny bit of hope for dog vocalizations to be reliably translated whereas cats I wouldn’t believe it possible at all