One of the greatest gifts that animals give to us is the way they receive from us without judgment and without limitation. They give us the opportunity to do the one thing that most of us never get the chance to do, to totally gift everything we have without limitation or consideration. What if your animals are more conscious than you are? When you acknowledge their consciousness, they will start to behave differently with you. They can teach you how to have a more expansive reality and they'll give this to you if you will listen. Animals can help you learn to function with the Earth.

New York Times bestselling author Jon Katz—“a Thoreau for modern times” (San Antonio Express-News)—offers us a deeper understanding of the inner lives of animals and teaches us how we can more effectively communicate with them, made real by his own remarkable experiences with a wide array of creatures great and small. In Talking to Animals, journalist Jon Katz—who left his Manhattan life behind two decades ago for life on a farm where he is surrounded by dogs, cats, sheep, horses, cows, goats, and chickens—marshals his experience to offer us a deeper insight into animals and the tools needed for effectively communicating with them. Devoting each chapter to a specific animal from his life, Katz tells funny and illuminating stories about his profound experiences with them, showing us how healthy engagement with animals falls into five key areas: Food, Movement, Visualization, Language, and Instincts. Along the way, we meet Simon the donkey who arrives at Katz’s farm near death and now serves as his Tai Chi partner. We meet Red the dog who started out antisocial and untrained and is now a therapy dog working with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. And we meet Winston, the dignified and brave rooster who was injured defending his hens from a hawk and who has better interpersonal skills than most humans. Thoughtful and intelligent, lively and powerful, this book will completely change the way you think about and interact with animals. Katz’s “honest, straightforward, and sometimes searing prose will speak to those who love animals, and might well convert some who do not” (Booklist).

"How Animals Talk explores the phenomenon of vocal, silent, and even motionless communication among animals. From crow talk to instant herd communication, author William J. Long theorizes that animals are much more intelligent, emotional, and moral than we have traditionally thought and that their ability to sense the presence of other living beings is an innate ability shared by humans as well. Based on many years of field observations, this classic text contains numerous examples of animal behavior that defy conventional explanation"--Simon & Schuster website, viewed September 14, 2022.

Talk with the animals something we can all do! Now you can communicate better with your animals. All you need is a love and understanding of them as individuals and personalities in their own right, and a willingness to listen, watch and learn. Ann Walker shares with us a lifetime of experiences and shows how the rewards of getting through to animals can be worthwhile even spectacular. Her own affinity with donkeys, ponies, mules, cats, dogs and sheep has had some surprising results at times! This book explains why animals are valuable companions for young and old, for the sick and disabled, and as partners for the blind. Ann Walker, popular Prime Time columnist and animal breeder, will help you develop day-to-day understanding with the animals who share your life.

Before media, before the Internet...there was talk itself. Talk Talk Talk is an incisive, exhilarating collection of essays by some of the best thinkers -- and talkers -- of our time. These stellar contributors locate everyday chatter as the basis of a stunning range of artistic and cultural forms: from Antigone's speech-acts to Freud's "talking cure"; from seventeenth-century demon possession to the Marx Brothers' "immigrant talk"; literature, theatre, standup comedy, "ethnic" talk, technologized talk and much, much more. Contributors include: Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Marjorie Garber, Sherry Turkle.

Talking-animal tales have conveyed anticruelty messages since the 18th-century beginnings of children's literature. Yet only in the modern period have animal characters become true subjects rather than objects of human neglect or benevolence. Modern fantasies reflect the shift from animal welfare to animal rights in 20th-century public discourse. This revolution in literary animal-human relations began with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and continued with the work of Kenneth Grahame, Hugh Lofting, P.L. Travers and E. B. White. Beginning with the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, this book examines ways in which animal characters gain an aura of authority through using language and then participate in reversals of power. The author provides a close reading of 10 acclaimed British and American children's fantasies or series published before 1975. Authors whose work has received little scholarly attention are also covered, including Robert Lawson, George Selden and Robert C. O'Brien.

“A unique and intriguing point of entry into the dialogues and a variety of concerns from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics, politics, and aesthetics.” —Eric Sanday, University of Kentucky Plato’s Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato’s dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato’s work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato’s understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in both Greek and English. “Plato’s Animals is a strong volume of beautifully written paeans to postmodern themes found in premodern thought.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews “Shows readers of Plato that he remains significant to issues currently pursued in Continental thought and especially in relation to Derrida and Heidegger.” —Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver “Will provide fertile ground for future work in this area.” —Jill Gordon, author of Plato’s Erotic World