Another Bone to Pick

Well, my beloved New York Times is at it again. The front page of the Science section yesterday had a 2 page article titled: "Chimps and Monkeys Could Talk. Why Don't They?" Well, duh...they do "talk" folks, you just can't understand it. And that's sort of what the article said - they interviewed this one hapless researcher, a psychologist from Scotland, who's been studying animal communication for, get this, 20 years! Now he's finally starting to catch on. Folks, I learned English, my native tongue, when I was just a few months old. Difference is, I had to learn what you all were yakking about to survive, and this guy was hanging out in the forest for a couple of decades just for fun.
And they even mention dogs in this article: "They can communicate very expressively-think how definitely dogs can make their desires known-but they do not link symbolic sounds together in sentences or have anything close to language." Huh? Symbolic, schmbolic, take a look at the thousands of dog blogs out there, and then we'll talk about "language".  Case closed.
Oh yeah, read the full article here: www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12monkey.html?hpw

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