I have a theory, and as far as I know, it is unigue.
Maybe all animals are as fully conscious as you and I (you are, aren’t you? 🙂 ) by default… and think in sentence structures like ours… but are either unable to vocalize, or simply not interested.
I was listening to Coast to Coast AM (again) in 2003 and a guest was a man who had a fully conversational parrot named Victor. This got me to thinking.
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I hypothesize that animals who show the most communication tendencies could actually be the ones with abnormal brains, the autistics.
Animals could understand us more, but really just don’t give a damn… we are so different that they (I’m running out of will to continue writing this, I’ll need to continue and refine this later)