We all try to talk with animals, but very few of us do so professionally.

And even fewer are trying to build devices that could allow us to communicate with our pets and farm animals.

Meet one person who is trying to do just that: Con Slobodchikoff, a professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University, and a modern-day Dr. Doolittle. Slobodchikoff is an animal behaviorist and researcher who has devoted his career -- 30 years of it, at any rate -- to the decoding of animal communications. And though Slobodchikoff has studied those signals across different species, he has focused his original research on the communications of the prairie dog. The creatures, he says, talk to each other using "the most sophisticated animal language that has been decoded." The animals have word-like phonemes, combining those into sentence-like calls. They have social chatter. They can distinguish between types of predators that are nearby -- dogs, coyotes, humans -- and seem to have developed warnings that specify the predators' species and size and color.

Originally Posted by Jennifer C 

That reminds me of one of my favorite books - The Dogs of Babel. This guy's wife dies and he thinks the only way to find out what happens is by teaching his dog to talk so the dog can tell him how she died. BUT in the book he fell in with a sketchy crowd who would hurt dogs (that sucked). It was a good book though. 

Stuff like this worries me a little because you think some might abuse it, but it would be amazing if a cow said, "Hey don't eat me because... " I wonder if people would be more caring then.