1. Cases of talking directly with animals
On 1 January 2004, the second of Ms. T's teachers from the spirit world made a memorable entrance into our finger-reading experiment, declared who he was, and formally took Ms. T on as a student. From then on she sat in meditation every day, working at the technique of communicating with animals. By the end of that year she had the basics in hand and could hold a conversation with some of them.
What follows are exchanges between Ms. T and pets brought in on 24 December 2004 by students taking the Human Potential seminar:
1.1 A conversation with a tortoise
Q: "What is your name?" "No answer"
Q: "How old are you?" A: "Twenty-something... (indistinct)"
Q: "Are you male or female?" A: "Feels female"
Q: "Is where you live all right?" A: "Where I live is fine"
Q: "Is there anything you want your owner to know?" A: "I want a companion"
As it turned out, the household had a pair of sea turtles, one male and one female, while this tortoise was on its own.
A week later the owner reported that the tortoise had changed after going home. When someone touched its head it no longer pulled back into its shell; it would stretch its neck right out, and seemed to enjoy human company more.
1.2 A conversation with a five-month-old puppy
Q: "What is your name?" A: "Bee... bee" (the owner said it was Bobe)
Q: "What do you like to eat?" A: "Something hard"
Q: "What did you have at lunch just now?" A: "Nothing" (the owner said he is fed morning and evening)
Q: "Is where you live all right?" A: "Where I live is fine"
Q: "Is there anything you want your owner to know?" A: "I want to go out and play"
Q: "How many people are in the family?" A: "Lots of people"
Q: "Could you bark three times?" "He barked once"
Seeing that Ms. T could get through to the puppy, the owner immediately made a request of his own:
Owner: "Please go in one fixed place" A: "I don't know where!"
Owner: "Tell him to go on the newspaper" A: "I don't know what a newspaper is"
I held up a newspaper for the dog to get a good look at A: "All right then!" (Ms. T felt he was just humoring us)
And sure enough, once home, his toilet habits had not improved at all.
1.3 Communicating with a dwarf hamster
Q: "What do you like to eat?" A: "Big, dark, not round."
Q: "Is there any left in your food dish?" A: "All gone! Finished!"
Q: "How are you feeling?" A: "My back leg is uncomfortable."
Q: "Have you settled in where you live?" A: "My back leg is uncomfortable, uncomfortable."
On closer inspection, the hamster's hind leg was broken — no wonder it was uncomfortable.
1.4 Asking a Dutch rabbit to perform
One student brought in a Dutch rabbit that had wandered into his garden and stayed. It was not affectionate with the family, so we asked Ms. T to talk to it.
To check that the rabbit understood her, we asked Ms. T to have it do something on request. The rabbit said it knew how to wash its face, so the first request was exactly that, and it worked. The catch was that the rabbit may simply like washing its face and have done it of its own accord rather than on command. So for the second request we asked it to give Ms. T a kiss on the cheek — and that worked too. When the student reported back in class a week later, the Dutch rabbit had become noticeably warmer toward its owners at home, rubbing itself against their legs.
2. What she was able to do after qualifying as a vet in 2013
In 2013 Ms. T passed her board exams and became a licensed veterinarian in California. On 6 March 2014 I invited her to give a talk at National Taiwan University's veterinary school — the same department that had once turned down her application, since upgraded to a full professional college. She presented six cases from her practice describing what she had observed. One was a dog that had swallowed a tennis ball lodged in its esophagus, invisible on the X-ray; she asked, and the problem was resolved quickly. Another was a cat with a persistent cough that the standard workup could not explain; when she asked, it emerged that a toy the family used to give it had been swept into a corner during a tidy-up, and the cat was put out about it.
Afterward the veterinary hospital staff and the students brought their own pets over for Ms. T to see. One was a groundhog that had not eaten for a week, to its owner's alarm; from her questioning, it turned out that its mouth hurt, and in fact its canine teeth had been ground down too short. Another student brought a household cat that had been calling out all day, every day, which worried the owner. Asked about it, the cat said she had had three kittens and was busy teaching them. The owner immediately confirmed that the cat had indeed just had a litter of three. That the cat had a concept of the number three was, frankly, startling. Doctor Dolittle, who understood the speech of animals, has stepped out of the pages of fiction — and it makes you wonder what veterinary practice might come to look like.
