Talking to Animals

You can't really 'talk to the animals', says Stephen R. Anderson. I personally find the whole debate irrelevant, not to mention frustrating and unnecessarily contentious (cf. Pinker & Bloom 1990 and Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch 2002); I couldn't care less if animals have language or not. A friend, writing on the whiteboard in my entryway, perhaps summed it up best with her drawing of a parrot saying "Alex is a douchebag."