Monday, September 17, 2018

Review: "Talking to Animals," Jon Katz


By Paul Carrier

The latest book from prolific author Jon Katz is many things: insightful, lyrical, heartwarming. But above all else, Talking to Animals is provocative, thanks to Katz’s take on the potential for human-animal communication.

The author of Soul of a Dog and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm argues in Talking to Animals that there are several tools humans can use to speak with other species, among them food, body language, attitude, and “visualization.”

Most of these — food, body language and attitude — are obvious and, to some extent, self-explanatory. But visualization is another matter. As Katz explains it, it involves using mental images to let animals know what we expect of them.

“At its simplest, visualization is imagining what you want to happen,” Katz writes. “Think about the future you want for you and your dog, and picture it clearly in your mind. If we form clear and consistent images of our desired outcome in our heads, animals will absorb that from our own body language, attitude, and even smell.”

In other words, our thoughts help shape how we handle ourselves, and because domesticated animals are so tuned in to our behavior, they can understand our expectations. Moreover, if we learn how to listen to animals, to be receptive to the non-verbal messages they convey, we can come to understand what they are trying to tell us as well.

In that sense, the title of Talking to Animals actually understates Katz’s message, because he not only suggests that we can speak to them but that they can talk to us too. It is not surprising, then, that Katz repeatedly describes his relationships with animals in mystical and spiritual terms.

My wife Liz and I have cats and dogs and chickens. One of the strongest bonds that we share is our love of animals. So I certainly would like to believe that the types of interactions Katz describes are possible. But to the skeptic in me, it all sounds more than a little far-fetched.

Still, I hesitate to dismiss unconventional beliefs simply because I do not understand them. Katz is not alone in his views. He writes that when he vigorously opposed a campaign in New York to eliminate that city’s carriage trade, which offers rides in horse-drawn carriages, a Sioux chief and spiritual leader named Argol Looking Horse met with Katz in New York and told him the carriage horses were trying to communicate with Katz.

“He told me that the horses were indeed speaking to me, that they had prayed for me to tell their story” as healthy, well-cared-for animals that actually enjoy their work and want to continue doing it, Katz writes. “In the Native American culture, he said, people spoke with horses all the time. Their culture respected the sacred and ancient bond between people and animals.”

Katz offers several compelling examples of his techniques in action, and with various species.

For example, a pregnant ewe named Ma “struggled painfully in her labor,” and it looked to Katz and a veterinarian like she would have to be put down without giving birth. When the vet set up an IV drip with antibiotics and glucose in a last-ditch effort to save Ma, she revived, but then deteriorated again. The end really seemed near for her, but Katz writes that he “sat on the ground with her. I was quiet for a few minutes, and then I imagined her giving birth,” visualizing a positive result to strengthen and motivate Ma. Katz waited quietly and patiently. Finally, Ma gave birth to first one, then two, lambs.

But Katz is vague about the nuts and bolts, the mechanics, of communicating with animals. There are repeated references in Talking to Animals to clearing one’s head, developing and projecting mental images, and listening to animals to determine their wants and needs, but it has a New Age feel to it that is long on generalities and short on specifics. Perhaps he means to say that humans do not so much talk with animals as signal our desires to them and intuit what their responses would be if they could, in fact, speak to us. Or maybe not. He does explain the back and forth between humans and animals quite literally.

There's no denying that Katz obviously has a special bond with his animals, based in part on a belief he shares with the late writer and naturalist Henry Beston. Katz quotes Beston’s famous dictum that animals "move finished and complete" in a world older than our own, "living by voices we shall never hear." Animals "are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations," Beston wrote, "caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”


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