Michio Kaku:  Some people would love to talk to their pet dog, but there is something I learned and that is animals have their own language that we humans have yet to decipher.  Take a look at the porpoise.  I had a chance to swim with the porpoise for a Science Channel special and I was quite curious about what we know about the language of the porpoise.  Basically nothing.  We can tape record their language.  It has whistles.  It has clicks, but we don’t know what they’re saying, but there is a software program that can tell that it’s an intelligent language.  If you take the English language we know that the letter E is the most common letter and you can rank these letters by how often they appear.  That is how you know that the English language is a language of intelligent, sentient beings by using a computer program even if you don’t speak a word of English.  Well you can do the same thing with porpoises.  Run the language of a porpoise through a computer program and bingo.  It’s intelligent, but we don’t know what they’re saying.  So dogs, yeah, they may have a very sophisticated language, but we have yet to decipher all the whining, barking noises they make except of course the gross ones they make late at night, so we have a long ways to go before we can talk to our dogs. 

Directed / Produced by
Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd