When Your Pet Speaks, Are You Listening?

The Monologue

I stood in my kitchen last Tuesday, explaining to my dog why I couldn’t take him for a walk right that second. Full explanation. Complete with hand gestures. He sat there, tail thumping against the floor, eyes locked on mine. I felt good about it—I’d communicated, right? Except he’d been sitting by his water bowl for the past five minutes, just staring at me, and I’d been too busy narrating my schedule to notice. He wasn’t asking for a walk. His water bowl had been empty since this morning. A.A. Milne wrote, “Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.” We’re excellent at projecting our interpretations onto animals. We’re considerably worse at shutting up long enough to hear what they’re actually saying.

The Listening Gap

Milne understood something most of us miss: talking to animals feels like connection, but it’s often just noise. Real connection requires the harder work of paying attention. When we talk to our pets, we’re usually explaining ourselves—why we’re leaving, why dinner is late, why they can’t have another treat. But listening? That means watching body language we’ve learned to ignore, noticing patterns we’ve dismissed as random, recognizing that the animal in front of us has been holding up their end of the conversation all along. The gap between talking and listening isn’t just about our pets. It’s about every animal whose signals we walk past because we’ve never learned their language.

When Expertise Meets Humility

Karen Pryor spent years training dolphins at Sea Life Park in Hawaii, teaching them behaviors for shows and research. She was good at her job—successful, confident, focused on results. But she missed something crucial. The dolphins were trying to tell her that the training sessions were stressing them out. She was so busy teaching them what she wanted that she didn’t notice their signals of frustration and fatigue. It took stepping back and actually observing—not directing, just watching—for her to see what they’d been communicating all along. Once she learned to listen first and instruct second, everything changed. The dolphins learned faster, performed better, and showed less stress. Her expertise hadn’t been the problem. Her assumption that she already knew what they needed was. That gap between professional knowledge and genuine attention exists for all of us, whether we’re working with dolphins or living with a rescue cat.

Learning to Listen

Start with silence. Spend ten minutes watching your pet without talking, without touching, without trying to engage. Just observe. What are they doing? How are they moving? Where are their eyes going? Most of us haven’t done this since the first week we brought them home. We’ve replaced observation with assumption.

Your dog sits by the door at the same time every evening, and you’ve labeled it “wants a walk.” But watch longer. Does he sit there on weekends too? Does he do it when it’s raining? Maybe he’s responding to a sound you’ve stopped hearing—a neighbor coming home, kids getting off a bus, something that makes him alert rather than restless. The patterns we’ve been dismissing as random often aren’t random at all.

That stray cat in your neighborhood who only appears at certain times is telling you something about her territory, her food sources, her safety. The dog tied up outside the store who’s lunging and barking? Watch longer. Is that aggression or panic? Wildlife counts too. The birds that scatter when you walk a certain path versus the ones that don’t—they’re communicating their comfort level with human presence.

Your cat knocks things off the counter, and you’ve decided she’s being spiteful. But spite requires a level of abstract thought most animals don’t possess. She’s probably bored, understimulated, or trying to get your attention for something you’ve missed. We interpret through our emotions—annoyed, frustrated, charmed—when we should be translating behavior as information. What’s she actually telling you?

One Day of Attention

Tomorrow, commit to one full day of listening. Every animal you encounter—your own pets, strays you pass, wildlife in your yard, even animals on screens—pause and observe instead of interpret. What are they actually showing you? Your pet’s morning routine might reveal something you’ve been missing. That dog barking in the neighbor’s yard at the same time every day might not be “just noisy”—he might be telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s alone too much. Don’t fix anything tomorrow. Just practice listening. The goal isn’t action yet. It’s attention.

Beyond Our Own Pets

Our pets are our teachers if we let them be. They’re fluent in a language we’ve mostly forgotten—the language of attention, of body signals, of patterns that mean something when we stop talking long enough to notice. Once you hear your own dog telling you he’s anxious about the mail carrier, you start recognizing anxiety in the shelter dog everyone labels “aggressive.” Once you catch your cat communicating that the litter box location bothers her, you start wondering what other animals in your community are trying to say about their environments. The problem Milne identified isn’t permanent. It’s solvable. But it requires us to get comfortable with the uncomfortable truth that we’ve been missing a lot. Our pets have been speaking clearly. Most of us just haven’t been listening.

Become a Listener

Start with your own pet today. Watch them like you’re meeting them for the first time. Then take that attention into your community. The animals around us—pets, strays, wildlife—are holding up their end of the conversation. They’re telling us what they need, what hurts, what frightens them, what brings them comfort. We just have to stop talking long enough to hear it. Listening is a practice, not a destination. Some days you’ll miss the signals. Some days you’ll catch something you’ve been missing for years. Both are part of becoming someone who actually hears what animals are saying.