A Catalog of Talking Dogs

 A Catalog of Talking Dogs

A wall of "Dogs Playing Poker" at the American Treasure Tour Museum, Oaks, PA

Man’s best friend, the dog, has never been much for conversation. Generally we think of good friends, let alone best friends, as someone we can converse with– and dogs are sorely ill-equipped to reciprocate on that front. Still, many dog owners talk to their furry friends, and part of the charm of the average canine is that they must rely on other forms of communication to respond. We may not know, from our human frame of reference, what the dog thinks. We don’t know if the dog considers the question “who’s a good boy?”, or whether he merely reacts to the tones and affect of his best friend’s voice in asking. Still, he cocks his head, gets excited, seemingly eager to prove that it is he who is the good boy. And he is. What more could one want out of friendship?

Dogs and humanity have a sacred bond, going back through the millennia to the earliest hunter-gatherer societies. They have always helped us along, whether through hunting or the pulling of sleds, or in protecting us from predators; as time went on dogs became designed through selective breeding and training for specific tasks to help their masters. It is no wonder then that as technology progressed, and we found other ways to accomplish tasks formerly in the domain of the pooch, that we continued keeping them just as companions. In all that time there was agreement, non-verbal and primal, that the two species were the best of friends. It stands to reason that at some point, some humans would want to hear even a few words from

their canine counterpart and, as it happens, some have.

One such example took the world by storm in 1911- Don, the Talking Dog, hailing from Germany. Don belonged to a gamekeeper named Ebers, who lived in Theerhutte, near Hamburg, Germany. According to him, Don spontaneously started to speak (in German, of course) at a young age. While begging for scraps at the table, Ebers said to the dog “You want something, don’t you?” and Don replied with “Haben, haben!” - or, in English, “Want, want!” Impressed by the pup’s wild talents, Ebers coached the dog on elocution and taught him other German words, some of which could be made into phrases. He was examined by zoologists in Hamburg and declared to be a “true prodigy”, and the newspapers ran with the scientific marvel of Don the Talking Dog. It was only a matter of time before Don hit the big time, traveling with Ebers’ daughter and exhibited on stage with Loney Haskell. He became famous enough that references can be found in newspapers of the era to “the famous talking dog”, and no name is needed. While reporting about Don is quick to mention that the dog was not the greatest conversationalist, his vocabulary of 8 German words- which he could use in context- were still considered remarkable. 

 

Don’s monopoly on fame in regard to canine elocution wouldn’t last forever, though. Soon other talking dogs began to appear in the news, seemingly unconnected to one another; reports across several decades often contain the phrase “who’s ever heard of a talking dog?” It seems the novelty of such things was largely regional, and such news rarely went “viral” in the early 20th century the way it does now. Nevertheless, a few other dogs were notable for their linguistic achievements. There probably were dozens of such wonderful animals, but a brief survey will suffice for our catalog here.

One notable and most puzzling example of a talking dog was reported in 1908, by a trio of policemen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Detectives Ehernfeld and Aymer, along with a Lt. Shields, were investigating a string of robberies in the East End when a Newfoundland dog walked up and said “good morning” before it “disappeared”. The stunned law enforcement officers clearly didn’t know what to make of the event, and without more information it remains a most mysterious happening. Robert Anton Wilson examines this report in Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati as he tries to grapple with the reality of his own baffling encounters, and entertains the thought experiment of UFOnauts projecting the idea of a talking dog to trained detectives just to see what happens. In Wilson’s rendering of the tale, the dog disappears in a puff of green smoke- which is interesting to this writer, who once received a report of a green, barking mist interrupting a party of drunken teens in a central Massachusetts wooded area. While most of the dogs in our catalog have far less in the way of paranormal qualities, it’s interesting to find that some do- including Pim, the Polish Talking Dog, who was apparently also psychic. Pim made headlines by failing to appear before The International Congress for Psychical Research in 1927, which the Spiritualists of the time had hoped the more materialistic members of the Congress would find convincing. Introducing a talking dog in the hopes of being taken more seriously may seem like an odd angle, but various psi experiments have been done with animals. Another German dog named Max was tested for his homing abilities, being driven miles from his home to see if he could find his way back- and he did. Other experiments specifically with dogs relate to their uncanny ability to know when their owner is arriving home, even under conditions when sensory clues are obscured. In our long friendship with the canine, many humans have seemingly exhibited such wild talents- so why wouldn’t our furry counterparts do the same?

Following on the heels of such weirdness, and during the last year of Don the Talking Dog’s life, enters Spike, the talking dog from Allentown.

Spike’s owner, Edward Huff, claimed to have taught Spike how to speak through his study of occultism. Huff thought that through mastery of the mind and occult sciences, a great many things could be accomplished. Setting out to prove this, he used this weird science to give Spike the power of speech. Spike could say a number of words, often manifesting as a normal whine or growl which would through difficulty become recognizable as “no”, “mama”, “papa”, or “good night”. Huff admitted that some words, such as “yes”, were perhaps impossible for even such occult-informed pups, so in conversation Spike would bark twice for yes, and once for no. While his celebrity didn’t bring him to the stage, it did make him popular with the locals- so much so, he couldn’t find room in his schedule for everyone who wished to speak with him. As an added bonus, during Spike’s day Allentown also boasted a walking dog named Nero, who would often spontaneously take to his hind legs when crossing streets.

Perhaps there was something in the water in Allentown, PA back in the nineteen-teens, or maybe as Huff would suggest, most dogs could be taught such things as simple speech.

As evidence to the variety of dog breeds capable of such speech, examples from the 1920s form an unlikely pairing of a Great Dane and a French Bulldog. Princess Jacqueline, a Frenchie from Maine, boasted the title of “only known talking dog” after being exhibited at a dog show in Boston. She had been examined by doctors from Johns Hopkins University, and determined to have unique and human-like vocal chords. This might explain her ability to pronounce such words as “Bangor”, “Ball”, “I will”, and when feeling feisty, “I won’t!”. She seemed also to live up to the etiquette her royal title implied, greeting visitors to her Portland home with “hello”, and seeing them off with a “goodbye” or “come again”. Boulderwall, on the other hand, learned speech out of necessity- as a Great Dane living in a New York apartment, her owners discouraged her from barking. Boulderwall’s human, lawyer Stuart Willard Tomkins, didn’t think it was newsworthy until he read reports touting Princess Jacqueline’s singular skill. I suppose it made sense to him, that with the mighty bark of the Dane stifled, that the dog would take to the English language. First, it was a request for water, which came out sounding like “wawer”- but eventually, Boulderwall could say “How do you do?” and “Hello, Henrietta”, when greeting Tomkins daughter of that name. One can’t help imagining a Scooby Doo voice here, but a newspaper of the time said that she couldn’t be coaxed into speech with snacks in front of reporters. Instead, she eventually stood up and said “I want to go out.” The New York reporters, who had seen just about everything, left the West 85th Street apartment with “skepticisms… shaken to their foundations.”

Around this time, a different kind of talking dog appeared on the Silver Screen, in a series of MGM shorts called the Dogville Comedies. Directed by Zion Myers and Jules White, who would later have success directing the Three Stooges, these “barkies” (a play on the recent addition of sound to film, referred to as “talkies”) featured dogs dressed in human clothing and performing vignettes which parodied everything from war films to courtroom dramas. While none of the dogs could talk in real life, the films stand as a cultural oddity similar to the famous Dogs Playing Poker paintings by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge decades prior. It speaks to humanity’s inherent tendency to anthropomorphize creatures and things, to remake even our best bestial friends in the image of ourselves. Undoubtedly, the methods used in the Dogville Comedies to achieve such effects would be considered cruel by today’s standards, and perhaps it’s best to let the dogs speak for themselves.

While on the subject of dogs and entertainment, though, a recurring theme emerges in the annals of talking dog history which must be something of an urban legend or joke which got reworked and repeated in the news going back to the mid nineteenth century: the story of a ventriloquist conning a tavern owner with a “talking dog”. Variations of this story appear over and over, with early reports claiming to have originated during a court battle in France. Nearly a century later, the same story is told with famous ventriloquist The Great Lester as the perpetrator of the con. The story goes that a down-on-his luck vent befriends a dog, then walks into a pub. He orders a drink (or food) and invites the proprietor to ask the dog what he wants. In convincing the proprietor that the dog can talk, a deal is eventually struck to buy the animal- only the pooch refuses to talk once the man has left with his newfound windfall. It’s a charming and fun little story, but given the variations over such a long span of time is probably just fiction.

More talking dogs are to be found in the 1940s- Sam, a shepherd from Champaign, Illinois, was taught to talk by her owner Jeanne Nowy, who worked as a speech therapist. Keeping with showbiz themes, and the changing times that began to bring televisions into American homes, our most audacious and stylish talking dog takes the stage: Tippy, the “2nd Most Useful Dog in the U.S.A.”. It’s unclear who the Most Useful Dog was at the time, but Tippy certainly seemed extraordinary and helpful to have around. While living in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, Tippy would help her owner Mrs. Higgins in caring for an elderly relative who was hard of hearing. Tippy would carry notes back and forth, fetch slippers, and even retrieve packages from the local store. If that’s not enough, she could dance by repeating the steps of Mrs. Higgins; she could climb ladders, ride ponies, somersault, and take mail from the postman. Her speech seemed to have been limited, especially compared to other dogs in our catalog- she mostly would say “mom, mom”, but her comprehension of words said to her seemed uncanny. What she lacked in elocution, though, she made up for in style, often wearing dresses and painted claws. In 1948 she was hoping for her own TV show, and it seems unlikely that it ever came to be.

Her services could have proved useful though, a year earlier, when the estate of one Carlton Bainbridge was lost in court. Bainbridge had left his wealth to his Irish Terriers, Pat and Gunner, who he claimed could talk. The dogs unfortunately remained mum in court, and Bainbridge was deemed to have been of unsound mind when he willed his money to them.

Who could blame the court? Even with all of the examples here given, the idea of a talking dog seems crazy. It might be surprising then to learn that one of the earliest well-documented accounts of a dog with powers of speech was that of Trouve, a Skye Terrier taught to talk by none other than famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Trouve could say “how are you, Grandmama?”- sort of. Bell trained the dog to continuously growl, then through manipulating the dog’s mouth and vocal chords could produce a convincing enough version of the phrase to pass muster with visitors to his home. Through this sort of gimmick, however, Bell began his foray into sonic transmission- proving once again the usefulness of man’s best friend. If it weren’t for Trouve, who knows what modern communication might have become?

Of course it’s possible that dogs can all talk anyway, and most of them just refuse to. A folktale this writer was unable to verify was found, regarding an Island of Dogs off the coast of the Komchatka Peninsula in Russia. According to this rendering of a legend, once upon a time, all dogs could speak. They could argue their case when humans tried to put them to work. They enjoyed hunting, but as man got better at it they became less useful- and the people tried to employ them as sled dogs. The unwilling mutts swam to a barren island, which became known as the Island of the Talking Dogs. Without much in the way of food or resources, the dogs became feral and cannibalistic. When the humans tried to offer them a home back on the mainland, the dogs pretended not to know them, angering the “Dog God Chami”, who took away their powers of speech for lying. Ever since then, they have been servants to mankind, unable to voice their opinions about it. They often seem happy enough, though, and our limited catalog only covers the beginning of the 20th century- many more talking dogs have come and gone since the days of Tippy, to be sure. Perhaps many went unreported, or an increasingly cynical society became less impressed with the guttural utterances of these pups. In today’s world of short attention spans and barrages of “content”, we must surely find examples, but none that shine as brightly as that German dog Don did in his time. 

Every dog has his day, as the saying goes- but not every dog has something to say about it.

Plantoids!

 

Back in the 1950s, when Flying Saucers were all the rage, people began claiming communications from the occupants of these otherworldly craft- and one commonality between the alleged messages to these so-called "contactees" was a message of environmentalism. The abandonment of nuclear weapons, and care for the lifeforms on planet Earth seemed to have been a top priority for these planet-hopping Space Brothers. One wonders what difference it made to those living on Venus, Saturn, or Mars? Was it a message of fraternity and altruism, or did it benefit them in some way? There have been a variety of answers, ranging from Theosophically informed New Age explanations about balancing life energies to more mundane but equally fantastical ones seemingly culled from the pages of pulp sci-fi mags. 

It may seem a strange question to even pose, as most people don't consider the claims of the contactees to be worthy of consideration. UFOlogy has long had a large schism between the more esoteric types of sky watchers and the "nuts and bolts" ET hunters, but either school of thought tends toward the idea that these craft (and by extension, the entities controlling them) come from another planet. There has always been some amount of thinkers who are inclined toward the idea that the source of these strange visitors might be much more terrestrial indeed. Still others have long contended that there were more metaphysical sources for these phenomena; Meade Layne, for instance, and others in the Borderland Sciences Research Associates, promoted the idea of Etherships from neighboring dimensions of reality. When we entertain the less-than-physical theories of UFOs, we open the door for everything from hallucinations to thought projections, from the unsatisfying mundane to the extremity of psychical weirdness. We always assume, however, that these entities are here for us or extensions of us; us humans, the top lifeforms of Planet Earth. We sometimes consider the mutilated cow or the scared dog, but rarely do we think about the variety of flora in the world. 

 Forteana more broadly has classically approached plants more skeptically, as evidenced by this clipping from a December 1950 issue of FATE Magazine. It's not all too often that the stories in their pages contains a disclaimer, but the tale of the Man-Eating Trees appears to have been too tall even for the editors there. Carnivorous plants are well-documented, and though somewhat exotic aren't necessarily weird. Something about the idea of a meat-eating plant, though, seems to spark a connection and allow us to anthropomorphize plant life, to imbue it with some level of sentience that we understand. We see it in fiction, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way, in films such as Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors and variations thereof. The carnivorous plant in the movie is actually an alien, which can talk, and demand blood. The vampiric plant being has precedent as well in The Thing From Another World, in which a frozen plant-based humanoid is thawed out from its apparent icy grave and sustains itself on plasma.

There aren't very many UFOlogical examples of this sort of thing, but one was recorded by Gray Barker in the 1960s- the case of Jennings Frederick, whose "Veggie Man" encounter culminated in the entity apparently latching on with suction cup fingers to draw blood. The creature, whatever it was, telepathically conveyed its need for medical assistance to the terrified Frederick, and it was implied that the being was an extraterrestrial. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mothboys Podcast (@mothboyspodcast)

 

Plant beings from outer space is a fun concept to consider, but it still relies on the idea of interplanetary or interstellar travel. It also implies the very human idea that the most superior forms of sentient being would be technologically adept and probably humanoid in appearance. The more magically inclined among us have, for centuries, accepted that plants have intendant spirit forms. Nature spirits and fairy entities from cultures around the world are intimately connected with plants, or are spiritual emanations from them in some cases. We tend also to anthropomorphize these, as in practices with plants such as the mandrake.

Less magical but still on the fringe, there has long been an argument that plants have a type of sentience- and, one imagines, such sentience would be nearly inconceivable to our monkey brains. The 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird popularized the idea, relying heavily on the "Backster Effect"- a series of findings by a man named Cleve Backster, who used a polygraph machine to test plant responses to stimuli. An episode of the popular TV series In Search of...  also focused on these ideas in the 70s, and L. Ron Hubbard claimed to confirm some of these results through the use of the same "E-Meter" he used in auditing members of his Church of Scientology. (Hubbard claimed that tomatoes "screamed" when sliced or pierced. One imagines he grinned ghoulishly while saying this.) Needless to say, the jury is still way out and plant intelligence is far from proven. Most, if not all of the ideas posed in the aforementioned media has been lambasted by scientists and disregarded as fiction. Fiction, however, provides a useful means of conjecture. Further, "sentience", "consciousness", and "intelligence" are ill-defined abstract terms using only the human mind as a baseline. Hungarian born botanist Raoul H. Francé argued for "True Botany" in his 1905 book Germs of Mind in Plants, saying that the endless categorization and study of dried plant "mummies" neglected the life, the important part of plant studies. Though useful, he felt that focusing on the minutiae of plant parts ignored the fact that humanity and plants of all types had a common bond; a will to live, that they had sensation, and a purpose. Through our animal eyes, we view other forms of sentience- if we see them at all- as either inferior or equivalent in some way to our own. It seems more likely that a non-human sentience and indeed a non-animal one would be so different from ours we may never see it at all.

There are quite a few unknowns in regard to human consciousness, and much controversy involved in investigating them. We don't quite know what happens to consciousness after the death of the body, for instance- nor do we really know the limits of the perceptions our minds can obtain. Extrasensory Perception has been studied for ages, and still unproven in the minds of many. It's worth noting that J. B. Rhine, who started the parapsychology lab at Duke University with his wife Louisa, had a degree in botany. If there are unknown borders to confine what we experience as human consciousness, who is to say whether there are overlapping borders with the neighboring lifeforms, those that sustain us through exchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide? Further, can we really discount the mystics, the folk tales, and the magical history of nature spirits? And, if we entertain discarnate entities as emanations from the flora, how is that different from the parapsychological apport or the mystical tulpa? Can plants manifest psychic apparitions, or solid objects? Can we?

This may seem to be an insane line of inquiry, but to the mind of this writer it all sounds more plausible than flesh and blood visitors from another planet on a nuts and bolts craft. It has a degree of unreality to it which is so weird it just might be true. Bringing us back to the contactees, it resolves the ecological mission of the Space Brothers. If Orthon or Aura Rhanes were actually plantmind phantasms, it would make a lot of sense. It was jokingly suggested before on this blog that Nessie might be a sentient blob of peat moss, and as the years have gone by I have warmed up to the idea as a real possibility.  As we consider the muck monster form, it is perhaps advisable to refer once again the our fictions as a basis for speculation...

The fictional character Swamp Thing first appeared in 1971, created by Len Wein for the DC Comic House of Secrets. The story of a scientist through misadventure transforming into a monstrous version of his former self saw several changes over the years, culminating in a movie version and a sequel, and several television shows. The "muck monster" idea had precedent in the Theodore Sturgeon story "It! The Thing that Couldn't Die!" and in a comic book called Air Fighters from the 1940s, featuring a monster called The Heap. In "It!", the monster seems to be an animated human skeleton at its core, killing purely out of curiosity; its sentience is unformed and basic. The Heap was animated through the indomitable will to live of a crashed pilot. For our purposes here, we'll stick with Swamp Thing, and more specifically the Saga of the Swamp Thing series written by Alan Moore.

In Moore's story, a lesser DC villain Jason Woodrue is given conditional release from prison to examine the corpse of Swamp Thing. He discovers that all of the organs one might expect to find in a human are there, but none of them fulfill the function they would in a human body- they are replicas, approximations of what human anatomy looks like. They are flora assuming the form of man, and there is actually nothing left of the scientist Alec Holland. So what consciousness drives the Thing? Woodrue's villain persona, the Fluoronic Man, manages to tap into plant consciousness and discovers a worldwide network that operates as one functional mind. He and Swamp Thing refer to it simply as "The Green", a cosmic life force that permeates all of the non-animal life on the planet. So foreign is this manner of sentience, it drives Woodrue mad and he becomes megalomaniacal. 

Our diversion into comic book reality may bear some relevance to a reality we all fail to recognize, though it surrounds us every day. Our houseplant, the denizens of our crisper drawer, or even the Christmas tree we cut down and plant in our living room may have a mind all its own- or, it may be tapped into a network of mind, a cosmic and ethereal energy inextricable from our habitable material realm. Perhaps Plantoids can manifest, as UFOs or lake monsters, as phantoms or fairies; perhaps they can use organic material to build a form or can solidify purely psychic ones. Perhaps the reader assumes that these are the idle thoughts of a human mind under the influence of particular kinds of plants. But maybe, just maybe, the reader is afraid to know that they are not the authority on sentience.