The fictional character Dr Doolittle asked the question with a kind of comic earnestness: what if we could talk to the animals?
It’s a childlike idea, funny and impossible and yet… not entirely!
Humans have always been trying to speak across boundaries. Half a million years ago, long before language as we know it, our ancestors were already scratching zigzags into shells and ochre, leaving messages no one today can quite translate. These marks weren’t words, but they were something….signals, patterns, proto-language, a way of saying I was here, or maybe just… this mark I made means something.
And nature has always answered back, in growth and habit and migration, in ways we once read fluently. The problem now is that most of us have forgotten the code. In the industrialised world, nature literacy has all but collapsed, we don’t recognise the song of the bird on the fence, the significance of the flower in the verge, the relevance of insect on the windowsill. For most people, wildlife has become anonymous, part of a backdrop….or worse, a problem to be scribbled over. Conservation groups are right to worry about this and to push for nature literacy in schools and adult learning. If we can’t even name what’s around us, how can we value it, let alone protect and act as its stewards?
And perhaps the question isn’t only about naming, perhaps it’s also about whether we can still hold a dialogue with the more-than-human world, whether there are ways of inscribing our intent into the fabric of things and letting nature reply. If that sounds fanciful, think again: the methods being trialled right now show that when we shape material with purpose, nature does indeed “message back,” adopting patterns and textures as habitat, responding with affirmation in the form of life anew.
Which brings us back to Dr Doolittle! Of course the real conversation with animals was never going to be in our own language, but in the older languages we once knew…the messages in gesture, rhythm, mark-making, and music. Maybe those early scratches in shell and stone were less about decoration and more about dialogue, a way of making contact before talking even existed. To recover that thread now; whether through what we call nature literacy, connectedness, or simply paying closer attention, really matters for ecosystems and for us too. Even the NHS’s Five Steps to Good Mental Health echo this truth: and it’s easy to see how every step grows stronger when it’s rooted in connections to the living world.
So maybe the question isn’t- what if we could talk to the animals? Maybe it’s how can we start listening again?