ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the role of dogs speaking . . . and in doing so, investigates the overlap between cognition, rhetoric, and reception aesthetics, suggestive of a new understanding of the rhetoric of listening to talking dogs. Writer, editor, animal trainer and translator Nina Murray asserts that
language at its most abstract can be understood as a secondary and tertiary semiotic system. Humans are probably the only ones around who get to the tertiary part of this, but many other creatures (dogs, bees, horses, chimps, rats) can be said to “speak” in the sense that they use a secondary semiotic system-they rely on signs to communicate messages. Whatever it is that enables a mind to formulate a link between a signifi er and a signifi ed, they got it. We can argue about the degree to which these links are negotiable for any individual animal, but they’re there. (Personal email to the author)
Lakoff and Johnson have established that reason even in its most abstract form makes use of rather than transcends our animal nature and in doing so, affi rms the co-evolutionary relationships we have with certain animals, especially dogs, not by separating us from them but placing us on a semiotic continuum. So if we take as our starting point the notion that the “animal speaks,” then how can we be sure that what the dog is “saying” is actually what we’re hearing or “receiving,” and what diff erence the knowing makes for our treatment of dogs and our understandings of them? Murray asks: “In what context(s) should we place these exchanges? Is the dog speaking by default? Always? By virtue of its presence around humans, or rhetorically, that is, with a purpose and an audience? Arguably, the dogs position vis-à-vis language, which is a secondary semiotic system, is dual: dogs can be said to use signals to communicate with humans, but dogs themselves become signs in human language” (ibid). Does this kind of cross-cultural conduct, cross-species conduct leave us, as Temple Grandin has wondered, lost in translation?
