AURA

Sine is such an optimist. I’m not so sure we’re going to hit it off with the little green men.

Maybe we will converse with whoever drops by our planet, but only if they choose to teach us how. If they come to us before we get to them, it’ll probably be because they’re smarter.

But we seem to think we’re more advanced than earthly animals. At least we act as if we are. Possibly the animals could tell us about the world from their perspective if we would just teach them how to communicate with us.

I actually think the animals have more going for them than we give them credit for. While I was doing a painting of this lady’s parrot, I saw that it had learned to make sounds approximating human words, and used them to express itself. Besides associating appropriate word sounds with some colors and shapes, the bird uttered the word NO when it didn’t want to do what Irene said and also when it was annoyed. Irene Pepperberg. That was the lady. She was doing research at the U of A. Things like seeds that the bird liked, the bird would say seeds, seeds, seeds over and over until Irene gave him some.

She had a book that gets into this kind of thing happens all over. Like dolphins. They seem to have learned something about big fishing boats that always throw their nets off just one side of the boat. The dolphins stay away from the nets, which fishermen guess is why not many dolphins get caught. Animal Minds was the book. By an ethnologist named Donald Griffin. You think maybe he should get into the space program?

SINE

May be. And there's another one I saw on PBS a couple days ago of a guy talking to turkeys. Absolutely amazing.

• Life could be a dream  (lyrics)

AURA

The thing is: If your great-great-great to the nth power grandma looked like the animals in that music clip, would you hug her and kiss her even though she still had a tail ? - Face it: You wouldn't even be around unless some other monkey in your family tree hadn't found her to be one delectable piece of . . . .

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