When my ginger rescue cat Marmalade crawls on my lap and meows at me urgently, I often find myself wishing I really knew what was going on inside his head.
It might seem like storybook stuff, but communicating with animals may be closer than we think. Earlier this year, researchers revealed they had discovered that sperm whales in the east Caribbean use a phonetic alphabet of 143 combinations of clicks. They described it as the closest system to human language yet discovered and hope that one day they will be able to communicate with these complex, social creatures.
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But it isn’t just whales. Artificial intelligence is also being used to try to understand , and . There’s even a on offer to the team that first cracks two-way communication between humans and animals.
At the RSPCA, the UK’s largest animal welfare charity, we recently launched our , based on a futures report we commissioned into animal welfare. It explores five scenarios of what the world could look like for animals – and us – in 2050.
The most optimistic depicts a future where AI progresses so much that we can converse freely with the animals around us. This breakthrough triggers a step change in how we see and treat animals, sparking a debate on animal rights: should they be citizens with all the rights and responsibilities that come along with that status; should they be able to vote? In this scenario, we punish abuse of animals as severely as human crimes, use animal testimony in court and most of us go vegan overnight.
I would like to believe that this could happen. The RSPCA is celebrating its 200th year and it is undeniable that since our founders sat in a coffee shop in London in 1824, imagining a better world for animals, humans have revolutionised our treatment of them. They have better protections than ever before, we recognise their sentience in law and we have largely ended the casual cruelty for our entertainment – cockfighting in pubs or dog fighting in the streets in the UK, for example – that our founders campaigned against.
At the same time, however, it is also undeniable that we have become disconnected from animals and turned them into commodities. If we have imagined communicating with them, we probably picture chatting away to our cats and dogs at home.
But what about the animals that end up on our plate or in laboratories? The chicken that grows so fast that, by the time she is just over a month old, she . The hen that lives her life in a cage the size of a piece of paper or one of the nearly 150,000 rats – those intelligent creatures that can solve problems, giggle when tickled and form deep bonds with humans – that are used in experiments in the UK? Right now, it is easy to ignore because it is normalised and sanctioned by government and industry and takes place behind closed doors. AI could make it much harder to pretend we don’t know.
Even our beloved pets might tell us things we don’t want to hear – the ones we have bred with “cute” squished faces that struggle to breathe, or the ones we dress up or scare for clicks and likes on social media.
Animal behaviourists would tell us that we already communicate with animals, as we understand their body language. But, in reality, we turn a blind eye to what they tell us when it threatens the way we want to live our lives. Genuine communication with them through AI would make it harder to ignore how our everyday choices affect the animals around us.
I am not sure we are ready for what they have got to say, but we need to listen, because the futures of us all are intrinsically linked.
Chris Sherwood is chief executive of the RSPCA
