If Your Pet Could Talk, What Would Be the First Thing It Says?
I don’t currently have a pet of my own—life between wards, lectures, and running a business doesn’t leave much room for someone else’s feeding schedule—but I’ve spent enough time around dogs and cats in Benin City to have a theory, and it isn’t flattering to us.
I think the first thing any pet would say, if it suddenly gained the power of speech, is: “Finally. Now sit down, I have questions.”
Not “I love you.” Not “Thank you for the food.” Something closer to an interrogation. Because think about what they’ve watched us do for years in complete silence—leave the house without explanation, come back smelling like other animals, disappear behind a phone screen for hours while sitting three feet away from them, cry sometimes for no reason they could identify. They’ve been quietly cataloguing all of it, and the moment they get language, I don’t think gratitude is first in line. I think it’s clarity. They’d want to know what we’ve been doing.
There’s something almost sacred about that idea, actually. We assume that if the people—or animals—closest to us could suddenly say everything they’ve been holding, it would be a declaration of affection. But real closeness usually produces something messier first: confusion, a backlog of small unresolved moments, maybe even a little hurt. “Why did you leave without me that one time?” “Why do you talk to that other dog like that?” “Where do you go when you’re sad and won’t tell me?”
I think about this in a slightly different context too—as someone who mentors young people through the Foundation and sits with patients who often can’t fully say what they’re feeling. Silence doesn’t mean absence of thought. It just means the thinking is happening somewhere we can’t audit it. A pet watching you for five years has an enormous amount of unspoken material. So would a quiet student. So would a patient who just nods at everything the doctor says.
Maybe that’s the real answer hiding under the funny one. If your pet could talk, the first thing it would say is probably not affection or complaint—it would be an invitation to finally close a gap that’s existed the whole time, one where they were paying far closer attention than we ever gave them credit for.
I’d like to think I’d listen well. Though knowing myself, I’d probably just ask it if it liked me back, which is exactly the kind of self-centered question it would already be expecting from me.