How people speak to their pets

 

The way people talk to their pets has always been something that interests me. I watch how people communicate with their pets and for some reason pet owners treat their animals like people, or family even.

 

I find that with dog owners it is especially noticeable. It seems as though they are trying to have a proper conversation with their dog, even when they know the dog is unable to answer. Why do people do this? Surely you may as well be talking to yourself? You can also see this with cat owners, although less common than dog owners. I myself have a cat and sometimes find myself talking to her, but why?

 

Deborah Tannen of Georgetown University based her studies on examples drawn from tape recordings. She discovered that in some cases, pets are used as a tool to mediate conflict between partners or even shift the conflict to humour. She also found that in a recording, a dog was used to frame the couple as a family. The male does this by talking the dog and addressing his partner as "Mummy" and therefore positioning her as the dog's mother. Tannen also claims that the couple were using "baby talk." According to Bilger, 84% of pet owners refer to themselves as "Mummy" and "Daddy."

 

In another example used by Tannen, this time involving a cat, the pet is used as a resource of communication between a mother and a daughter. The mother said "Pay lots of attention to the cat; she misses you so much." By saying this, the mother was trying to show that she herself missed her daughter, but used the cat as a resource to avoid conflict with her daughter.

 

Tannen also looks at the theory of ventriloquizing which is where family members use speaking as their pets as a way of communicating with each other. For example saying things like "Can you say.."

 

Stanley Coren also looked at the animal-human bond. He carried out some online surveys involving around 1000 people. He discovered something very strange about how the pet owners of today seem the "blur the lines between children and pet dogs."

He found that 81% of people now consider their dogs to be part of the family and in equal status to their children. Also, 54% of Americans now consider themselves to be "pet parents" rather than pet owners.

 

Coren found that 77% of pet owners talk to their pets as if they were actually family members. Other research found that links to Coren's research showed that owners often speak to their pets using similar rhythms that you use when talking to children. The same can be said for nicknames. Often parents have several nicknames for their children and use them in different situations and surveys show it can be the same for dogs.

 

In conclusion, research has shown that people talk to their pets for different reasons, for resources of communication, because they see them as part of the family and it could just simply be because they are lonely. I look forward to seeing what I can find when I research this further.

 

Alice Lirette