What would you say to an animal if it could understand you?

If animals could talk what would they say?  Or would you be more interested in what you could say to them, if they could understand you perfectly?  I think we would be quite surprised by what animals think.  I do believe they can think, to what extent they are self-aware however I think is debatable, but one thing is for sure, some animals show positive signs of intelligence.

The idea of being able to communicate with animals might seem a little farcical and hark of a Disney movie or something from Doctor Dolittle but technology is advancing that allows us to talk to other people who don't understand our language through digital interpreters and translation, the same research has been carried out on communicating with animals and while most of it is inconclusive and is still in its infancy the question arises as with any fledgeling technology - what would you do with it?

Human being have used animals throughout history for all sorts of tasks.  Security, safety, defence, transportation, companionship, to name but a few.  The time it takes to train these animals in their jobs and the efficiency of the processes would be greatly improved by this technology - it would also allow an animal to literally have a voice on the matter and say whether they really want to do it or not to begin with.  While the ethical questions of whether or not animals should be used for work are something we can discuss another day, we can at least say there are some animal jobs such as guide dogs, that are beneficial to people and do not exploit the animals in a way that would cause offense to most people.  Whether or not their jobs would improve if they could speak is an interesting question.

The other question to ask here is whether or not creating robots with intelligence would make most animals redundant.  While that may make some people happy at the thought of animals no longer being used in this way, there is the obvious issue of preservation that would result if we pursued that route - notably that many animals are alive and in abundance today because we need them.  The Chicken for example would likely be extinct by now if it was not edible.  There are no wild chickens in the UK anymore except the odd feral bird that escaped; the wild chicken from which the chickens we eat today descended is no longer found here.  Likewise if we didn't eat meat at all the question of whether or not cows would be extinct is equally as intriguing.  Somehow the idea that they could talk to us makes the possibility of them becoming extinct a little more remote.