If I could talk to the animals oh just something something something.

I’ve never been good with lyrics, but my sister is. She is also very good at communicating with animals. Recently while househunting, she went into an apartment and saw two cats. Usually she is highly allergic to cats and will break out in all kinds of things just from walking down the pet food aisle at the supermarket, but this time, there was no reaction, only communication. Not verbal but telepathic. According to my sister, the cats told her ‘this place is good. You will be safe here.’ She later had her girlfriend drive her back past the apartment to see if she could re-channel the cats. No luck. Maybe the cats were out.

Not everyone is as lucky (drunk?) as my sister though, and unlike sister and Dr Doolittle, few of us can talk to the animals. Or at least, very few of us can talk with animals. For those of us who can’t hear the cat’s response, we have to turn to books. We must live vicariously in worlds where animals speak in our languages and have human feelings.

Whoo whoo click click (that was me doing the whistle and click thing that Fantastic Mr Fox does in the movie, just in case you couldn’t tell).

And that’s a good place to start. Fantastic Mr Fox. I had never read this book until my five-year-old niece read it to me. She’s good like that; we’re working on War and Peace at the moment. In my mind, and that of my niece, Roald Dahl can do no wrong. I don’t care if he brings down the Cadbury empire (hold up, too far, Caro), this is the guy who wrote Boy and The Witches, The BFG – I know, I’m preaching to the converted but sometimes it’s nice just to think about all the wonderful worlds he created. Not to mention all the wonderful anthropomorphic animals. There are so many books for kids that have anthropomorphic characters – it’s why kids are so happy. They get to read books like Charlotte’s Web, and hang out with Piglet, Mole and the Berenstein Bears. Grown-ups get fifty shades of humans talking about stuff and sometimes taking their pants down.

Technically Watership Down is a book for kids, but it scarred me for life. At my primary school they used to play movies instead of teaching us – probably due to funding issues, or because our teachers recognised that our year group was a lost cause. The only two VHS cassettes the school owned were Labyrinth and Watership Down. I was scared of both movies and used to be filled with dread when my teacher would wheel out the old TV stand. A few years after being tortured (repeatedly) by the film, I was made to read the book and it didn’t help allay any of my fears. I became forever scared of both rabbits and books. I do wonder though what would happen if I read the book now, as a grown-up. One day maybe I’ll dare to open it, but chances are I’ll wuss out and end up curled in fetal position nursing my vial of myxomatosis.

Less scarring only for the fact that I was a grown-up when I read it, but no less powerful is Dog Boy by Australian author Eva Hornung. This is a great example of the difference between talking animal books for kids and those for adults. There are no puppies in vests and cravats, no happy molehill communities. There is only Romochka, a small boy, communicating with the pack of feral dogs that has taken him in. The way the author creates the world of human-animal communication and a shared language is fascinating. The brutality of the Russian winter, of life on the streets, of the abandonment and abuse of society’s most vulnerable members is haunting in an entirely unsentimental way. If you like animals and you don’t hate kids, you’ll like this one.

Graphic novels are a great conversation starter at a sophisticated soiree (stick with me and you will have so many friends). They are often littered with talking animals: Maus is the good example, but there are so many others, like my favourite Goodbye Chunky Rice, as well as Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes (and yes, I do realise that Maus and Garfield appeal to different ends of the graphic novel/comic spectrum. Oh, lasagne.) I’ve barely even come close to the surface of anthropomorphism in comics, let alone scratched it. I’d scratch Hobbes though if I could.

For talking animals in an adult book, it’s hard to go past Animal Farm. As a child I loved animal stories and was a huge James Herriot fan. Tales about vets in the English countryside were my cup of Milo. And then I saw this on dad’s shelf. Animal Farm, that sounds like me, I thought. When you’re expecting James Herriot and you get Orwell, it can have a rather profound effect on your life. Maybe I’ll get my niece to read this one aloud to me next. Just to watch her face.

A few years later, I asked Dad to buy me a book I had found while browsing with him in our local suburban bookstore. It had dogs in top hats on the cover, and it looked like a big-kid book that I would enjoy. The Lives of the Monster Dogs was again not what I had been expecting, but I’ve never ever forgotten it. Drawing from Frankenstein, The Lives of the Monster Dogs is about a race of dogs engineered to walk and talk like humans – they even have biomechanical human hands. I remember an early scene where a dog was being ‘operated on’. As I child I was fervently anti-vivisection (as an adult as well, obviously, but it was kind of an odd thing to obsess over as a child) and this scene struck fear into me, ramping up my vigilante crusade against all those operating on live and conscious dogs on the Gold Coast. I showed them: I did a speech on the topic for my school class that opened with me playing Julian Lennon’s ‘Salt Water Wells in My Eyes’ and lining all my animal-shaped Body Shop soaps up on the table in front of me. I never finished the book though.

I was equally damaged by Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish. While there are no Frankenstein gorillas speaking English and wearing monocles, the separation between humans and animals is breached in a way that most little girls may not want to know about. The novel is a powerful story of the efforts to communicate with Eliza, a gorilla, using Auslan.

I really should revisit all these talking animals and their wondrous (or horrific) worlds as an adult, but the truth is I’m probably more of a wuss and have my head buried further in the sand now than I did in my teens and early twenties. I think I’ll just stick with working my way through my niece’s book collection for now. That Spot guy sure is a whacky character.