I expect everyone interested in dogs (or any animals) wonders whether
either domesticated or wild dogs would every be capable of talking- in
thousands or millions of years, or never. One school of thought says
never, as they do not have the need to advance mentally. What do you
think?

Miles----
Sydney.

Direct replies to:

miles spoke these words of wisdom in news:84f4634e-
:

I expect everyone interested in dogs (or any animals) wonders whether
either domesticated or wild dogs would every be capable of talking- in
thousands or millions of years, or never. One school of thought says
never, as they do not have the need to advance mentally. What do you
think?

Miles----
Sydney.

Direct replies to:


It's not a matter of mental advancement. It's a matter of dogs not having
vocal cords to create the complexity of speech

diddy wrote:
miles spoke these words of wisdom in news:84f4634e-
:


I expect everyone interested in dogs (or any animals) wonders whether
either domesticated or wild dogs would every be capable of talking- in
thousands or millions of years, or never. One school of thought says
never, as they do not have the need to advance mentally. What do you
think?

Miles----
Sydney.

Direct replies to:



It's not a matter of mental advancement. It's a matter of dogs not having
vocal cords to create the complexity of speech

Or the right sort of lips and tongue.

On a day to day basis my dogs are pretty good about letting me know
what's on their minds, but it would be nice, when they're sick or
injured, to be able to ask them to tell me where it hurts.

I expect everyone interested in dogs (or any animals) wonders whether
either domesticated or wild dogs would every be capable of talking- in
thousands or millions of years, or never. One school of thought says
never, as they do not have the need to advance mentally. What do you
think?

There are two parts of this idea, one will they ever be able to
vocalize and communicate their intentions, and the second is will they
be able to do so directly in an intelligible human language.

As to the second, I have no idea. But as to the first, we're already
there.

Given what my dog tells me, I'm not sure we'd gain much by having them
be able to say "I need to go out", "Dinner is late", "I'm bored, can
we go play?" or "That smells so good, can I have some?" directly. I
get the message quite clearly as a series of behaviors, barks, and
whines which are easy enough to interpret in context.

Perhaps the bigger idea hinted at in your question is if we could get
them the ability to talk in a human language, would we be able get
them to talk philosophically about their perceptions and relay them to
us so we can learn more about what it means to be a dog, or perhaps
how they view the world, or will we still just be communicating about
their basic needs like "out, play, food, pay attention to me" only now
in words? Or perhaps we could at least take it to the next step and
explain why they don't get the table scraps well enough for them to
understand and stop begging? Introduce the whole idea of health and
welfare sometimes taking precedence over needs of the moment?

Of course, the reverse would also be true. Given my dog's current
ability to get me to do what he wants, I think I'd be a little leary
of giving him more yet powers of persuasion...
--Glenn Lyford

"miles" wrote in message
...
I expect everyone interested in dogs (or any animals) wonders whether
either domesticated or wild dogs would every be capable of talking- in
thousands or millions of years, or never. One school of thought says
never, as they do not have the need to advance mentally. What do you
think?


I always love a good troll....

Any animal specie is capable of talking in "millions" of years. It only
took
the human specie about 2 million years to evolve from Homo erectus and
we have speech now. Of course, that stock came from apes or chimpanze
stock, not dog, so a lot of the work had been already done. Ape and canine
families probably diverged about 10 million years ago.

The real question is, will causative events exist in the future to push dog
evolution toward speech? The causative events for mammalian evolution and
thus
humanity was the creation of niches as a result of the die-off of the
Dinosaurs at the
end of the Cretaceous period. Those niches do not exist at the current
time -
but with humanities apparent propensity for self-extinction, it's a good bet
that
at some period of time millions of years hence, those niches will exist
again.

It's going to take more than just self-awareness and the ability to speak to
pull
our butts out of the fire once the oil runs out. Praying to your deity of
choice
isn't going to do it - the Bible has stories of manna raining down, but not
oil...

Ted