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.”

Review: "Soul of a Dog," Jon Katz

By Paul Carrier

The author of close to 20 books, several of them about dogs, Jon Katz probably is one of the better-known, and most popular, chroniclers of Canis lupis familiaris, aka, the domesticated pooch.

But Katz is not a trainer, veterinarian or behaviorist. He's a storyteller. He tells tales about dogs - true tales that focus on the animals with which he shares the aptly named Bedlam Farm in upstate New York.

As the title of Katz’ latest book suggests, Soul of a Dog zeroes in on the spiritual and psychological dimensions of the animal kingdom. Katz tries to tease out answers to various questions, such as whether dogs have souls (he says yes) and what form they take. (That’s where things get more complicated.)

Katz uses the word “soul” in two contexts, sometimes regarding a canine afterlife and at other times simply to refer to the animating spirit or force that drives an animal in this life. That is confusing initially, but the dual definitions eventually sort themselves out.

Despite his profound love of animals (especially his border collies and labs), Katz is no sentimentalist. He tries to resist anthropomorphizing, rejects any notion that dogs and cats are four-legged people in fur coats and even has a few harsh words (such as “self-righteous”) for some of the people involved in animal-rescue efforts.

That mix of warm-hearted affection and tough-minded insight makes for a refreshing, thought-provoking read. Although Katz is devoted to his animals he also is analytical and clear-eyed about their motivations, instincts, skills and limitations. We bond very strongly with them, Katz argues, but they are not like us.

There is a certain alchemy to what Katz does, which is to observe his animals closely, contemplate the whys and wherefores of their behavior and put it all down on paper.

Of course, his task is that much easier, and the end result more compelling, because he lives on a farm. I love to watch my two dogs and four cats interact with one another, but there are no cows, sheep, goats, donkeys or chickens in our urban menagerie. So the experience is less exotic here, and the stories less varied, than at Bedlam Farm.

Katz is not an animal writer from the knee-slapping “dog hijinks” school, although he does have a sense of humor. He notes, for example, that his goats are not omnivores. They have their gastronomic preferences: Paul Newman’s low-fat popcorn (with the bag, of course), as well as oat cookies and Cheerios.

Eloquent, even profound, in describing his subjects, Katz treats them with respect, admiration and more than a dash of perplexity. Despite the specificity of the title, Soul of a Dog explores several species of farm animals, although its primary focus is, in fact, on dogdom.

The text is peppered with references to Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine as Katz examines the alleged superiority of humans over the rest of the animal kingdom. He repeatedly acknowledges the limits of his knowledge about the souls, celestial or terrestrial, of the creatures of Bedlam Farm, and he suggests that some aspects of animal life, such as whether dogs can reason, are unknowable.

“Perhaps,” he writes, the mystery is “part of their appeal."

I came away with the impression that Katz, in evaluating the spiritual definition of a soul, is not at all sure there is a heaven, either human or canine. The conflicting beliefs of clergy and theologians on the canine soul, or the lack thereof, do not help to clarify things.

If there is a hereafter, though, it’s clear that Katz hopes the animals he holds dear - the border collies Rose and Izzy, the lab Lenore, and at least some of the other farm critters - will find a place to romp and roam there. When their time comes.