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Who
Let The Dogs Out? Woof! What?
by Mad Dog
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This long sought
after invention brings us one step closer to mankind’s oldest
goal—to become just like Dr. Doolittle. The Rex Harrison one, not the
Eddie Murphy one. |
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Have you ever wondered
what that dog next door was trying to tell the neighborhood when he
barked for two straight hours starting at 3:00 AM, keeping you awake in
spite of the earplugs, the pillow over your head, and your yelling out
the window every ten minutes? Now, thanks to a company in—guess
where!—Japan, you can find out. Takara Co., Ltd (motto: “Barking and
screaming our way into the 21st century”) has released a “portable
emotional analyzer” called Bowlingual which they say can translate a
dog’s barking. Of course at the moment you have to speak Japanese to
know what Spot-san is saying, but I suspect that’s easier than
learning to speak fluent Doggish. It must be since it took Takara and
two other high tech companies several years to get this thing working
and it can still only identify six types of barks.
The dog wears a collar that contains
a microphone. This transmits the dog’s yapping to a device which
analyzes it, then displays its meaning on a screen, much like a
subtitled version of Beethoven with your dog playing the part of
Beethoven and you playing Charles Grodin, only you’re allowed to put
inflection in your voice. It tells you whether your dog is happy, sad,
frustrated, angry, assertive, or desirous. It doesn’t tell you why,
that’s up to you to figure out. For that you need to rely on good old
visual clues. For example, if your dog is barking and you’re opening a
can of corned beef hash, it’s probably because it can’t tell the
difference between that and dog food. Not that many of us can either. If
she barks at the mailman every day, it’s a probably a sign that she
needs more ginkgo in her diet because the mailman’s walked up to the
house every day of the dog’s life—seven times a day in dog
years—so she certainly should remember him by now. Of course if he’s
humping your leg—that’s the dog, not the mailman—you might need a
Bowlingual, since this could be caused by any of those six emotions,
though obnoxious is what usually comes to mind. (NOTE: If it is the
mailman humping your leg, Bowlingual won’t help. Pepper spray might.)
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Deer could
probably learn to bark, in which case we could outfit them all with
Bowlingual collars, learn Japanese, and find out what they’re saying.
It will probably turn out to be “Bambi was playing with matches.” |
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This long
sought after invention brings us one step closer to mankind’s oldest
goal—to become just like Dr. Doolittle. The Rex Harrison one, not the
Eddie Murphy one. Imagine being able to know what your cat is saying
when she sits on your face in the middle of the night and pretends your
nose is a catnip mouse. Or being able to tell whether your parakeet is
singing because it’s happy, bored, showing off for the cute little
pigeon sitting on the window sill, or trying to drown out all the hype
over Kelly Clarkson, the winner of American Idol. Or just trying
to drown her out.
Hopefully once they perfect
Bowlingual they’ll expand it so it can translate for other animals. An
elephant version would have come in handy in India recently when herds
of wild pachyderms stormed into some villages, drank the resident’s
homemade beer, then in a gesture of complete boorishness and
ungratefulness, complained because there was no Guinness. Just kidding,
actually they destroyed the villagers houses while drunk. Talk about
rude houseguests who won’t be invited back. At the very least a
Bowlingual Dumbotron IV would have helped the elephants in court when
they tried to defend themselves on the grounds that the villagers should
have carded them before they were allowed into town. Hey, if you’ve
ever heard an elephant testify you know how ambiguous some of those
trumpeted roars can be.
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If a dog’s vocabulary is as limited as the Bowlingual
makes it out to be we’re going to get bored with the conversation
pretty quickly. But that doesn’t mean we won’t find other uses for
it. |
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Knowing what animals are saying would not only make life around
the house quieter, it could also save lives. In the United States,
27,000 people a year are injured by rats. Face it, we have no idea what
all that squeaking is about. What we’ve always assumed was a sign of
aggression or hunger could, in fact, be them asking that all copies of
Michael Jackson’s Ben be destroyed, something no sane person
would object to. And what about the more than 1 million collisions that
occur each year between deer and cars? If we knew what deer were saying
when they leaped out in front of us it could help save their lives and
our car insurance rates. Okay, so deer don’t speak, but they could
probably learn to bark, in which case we could outfit them all with
Bowlingual collars, learn Japanese, and find out what they’re saying.
It will probably turn out to be “Bambi was playing with matches.”
I don’t expect the Bowlingual to be
a huge seller. After all, if a dog’s vocabulary is as limited as the
Bowlingual makes it out to be we’re going to get bored with the
conversation pretty quickly. But that doesn’t mean we won’t find
other uses for it. Moviegoers could use it to translate Marlon
Brando’s mumbling. Los Angeles traffic police could use it to
interpret Nick Nolte’s excuse the next time he’s pulled over. And
the United Nations could use it to determine if President Bush’s bark
is worse than his bite. I smell a Nobel Peace Prize in the making.
©2002 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
Read them to your dog.
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