NAKED CITY: IF ANIMALS COULD REALLY TALK!
Twenty-twelve is the Chinese year of the Dragon and we’re reliably informed by our Chinese friends that whilst the mythical creature might breathe fire and brimstone it does not talk – either in Mandarin or Cantonese. That’s not to say Hollywood won’t jump on the bandwagon and produce a Pixar style 3D talking dragon animation, voiced over by no less than Jackie Chan and in a series of multiple dialects.
Ever since Mickey Mouse was first gifted with the human tongue in the 1929 cartoon The Karnival Kid it seems we’ve been obsessed with the idea of animals talking. The Disney studios have since churned out hundreds of chatterbox critters and still do but lately anthropomorphism has reached a level bordering on the absurd.
Turn on the TV these days and there’s a menagerie of talking animals from cockroaches and squirrels to cats and birds flogging everything from pet food to banking services. Optus in particular has assembled a veritable zoo of friendly and furry friends to talk up their products. No doubt the agencies behind these adverts have done their research and realize that the talking animal strikes a particular nerve in the human psyche.
Maybe it’s the guilt factor as nobody would argue that collectively animals have been treated like crap – slaughtered, abused, tortured, eaten and used for all manner of horrendous medical experiments – not to mention environmental destruction and numerous other atrocities. They are of course also there for our amusement and perhaps by pretending that some can actually speak we are excluding a minority, like George Miller’s Happy Feet penguins, from the grim reality of battery chickens and dolphins clubbed to death in Japan.
If somewhere along the evolutionary line animals did develop the ability to mouth the human lingo it’s unlikely they would want to sit down for a friendly discourse with their long time tormentors. What about the cattle slaughtered in Indonesian abattoirs that created such a controversy earlier in the year?. Had they been able to communicate their palpable distress in a human tongue perhaps the practice would have been abolished years ago.
You could well argue that anthropomorphizing animals, giving them both human qualities and language, is just a further degradation of all non human species. Surely most animals wouldn’t want a bar of the way mankind have behaved over the past few thousands years when it comes to all the evil and wars perpetrated in the world. And could an elephant really be bothered sending a Tweet?
Animals do a pretty good job of communicating with their own species through all manner of sounds and gestures. They need human language like they need a vivisection or their entrails ripped out. Hey, let’s have a moratorium on talking fauna in 2012. Nobody would be laughing if humans were reduced to barking, meowing and roaring. Surely the opposite applies as well. Woof Woof!
