My horse told me it wanted to die… here’s how to listen to your pets

Every pet owner has thought, at one time or another, how splendid it would be if only our animals could talk. Imagine if we could ask them what they’re thinking and feeling, what they dream about when they lie on the sofa twitching in their sleep – and, of course, what they think about us.

Do they adore us, as we like to imagine, or simply tolerate us because we give them food and shelter?

An inquisitive hound 

British journalist Amelia Thomas, who lives on a farm in Nova Scotia in Canada with her Finnish husband, five children and a menagerie that includes dogs, a cat, chickens, two pigs and two horses, has an interest in animal communication.

Two decades ago her apartment building caught fire at night and she and her family were saved only by the furious barking of their dog, Milo. Ever since then, Thomas has paid careful attention to sudden changes in animal behaviour, and over the course of a year she decides to investigate whether it’s possible to truly understand what animals are saying to us.

A great deal of scientific research has gone into teaching parrots and chimpanzees to mimic and respond to a large range of words, but the fact is we are still no nearer to having a proper conversation with an animal than we were in 1920 when Hugh Lofting wrote The Story Of Dr Dolittle.

Increasingly, artificial intelligence is being used to try to decode the meaning behind animal language. Even so, progress has been painfully slow.

What Sheep Think About the Weather is available now from the Mail Bookshop 

With conventional conversations off the table for the foreseeable future, Thomas focuses on the non-verbal ways we can communicate with animals. Whereas dogs can smell whether humans are happy, afraid, sick or stressed, and horses can accurately read our facial expressions, most of us put little effort into understanding animal body language.

Few of us are aware that happy and relaxed dogs tend to wag their tails more to the right, and anxious dogs to the left, or that horses have 17 basic facial expressions, compared with a human’s 27.

And, to answer the title of this book, it turns out that sheep don’t mind snow and rain, but they heartily dislike windy days.

Attempting to think more like a dog, Thomas gets down on her hands and knees and sniffs all around her house. She realises that for dogs, who have 50 times more scent receptors than humans, smelling is a kind of time travel, ‘like our eyes seeing live-action replays of things that happened months or even centuries ago’.

After learning that Darwin thought animals loved novelty, simply for its own sake, she kicks a football around with her dog and two pigs, who are enchanted. Thomas starts dreaming of ‘a great interspecies soccer match’.

She attends a course on ‘quantum entanglement’, or psychic communication with animals. When her beloved horse, Major, who has been off-colour for a while, leans his forehead against hers, she knows that he is telling her ‘I’ve had enough’ and that he doesn’t want more treatment.

The vet concurs.

Although its findings are frustratingly inconclusive, this is a thought-provoking and very readable book.

Thomas suggests that, while we may never be able to actually converse with our pets, if we spent less time talking at them and more time listening to them and observing them, we could communicate far more effectively with the animals who share our lives.