Originally posted by pragmathen
I remember an Onion article about <a href="http://www.theonion.com/onion3630/dolphins_evolve_thumbs.html">dolphins</a> that got me laughing. Something about them developing opposable thumbs which causes us humans to become uncomfortable.
Anyway, it would be tremendously interesting (to me at least) to find out just what animals are thinking about. There was a story in <i>Congo</i> (a not-quite good M Crichton book) about communicating with gorillas. The liaison was a gorilla that knew sign language. The key was to get this signing gorilla to communicate with regular gorillas and then to transliterate back to the human researchers what the gorillas were saying. Nothing really came of it in the book, but I thought it an interesting idea.
Well, don't know what else to say on this. Good points, though.