Political Animals

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, September 10, 2026

 

In a 2017 Saturday Night Live sketch, host Scarlett Johansson plays a researcher who has developed a new device that can scan a household pet’s brain and tell its owner what the animal is thinking. She demonstrates it on her own pug, Max. To the astonishment of everyone, Max begins talking about how he likes playing ball and going to the park.

 

Oh, and he likes Donald Trump. “He’s my man,” he says to the room of horrified scientists. Max then explains that he doesn’t want to see Americans’ tax dollars “going to health care for illegals.” Of his chihuahua friend, he says: “Poquito was born here, he has nothing to worry about.”

 

Researchers today are worried that when artificial intelligence lets us talk to animals, it will create an “ethical minefield,” giving humans a new way to “manipulate, exploit and harm” our pets.

 

In a recent Bloomberg story, reporter Morgan Meaker talked to a number of biologists and researchers who are recording animals and feeding their interactions into AI models, hoping patterns will help us decode what they are saying to each other, and maybe one day, even allow us to talk to them ourselves.

 

Of course, like those in the Max the Talking Dog sketch, these researchers are certain that dogs, cats, hippos, and lemurs would all be fellow progressive revolutionaries, lecturing humans on all sorts of lefty causes.

 

Meaker writes that most researchers in this field have a shared motivation: “if humans better understand the interior world of other species, they are less likely to shrug at climate change, endorse industrial farming or participate in habitat loss.”

 

People who have actually interacted with dogs would assess it as less likely that they’re sitting around thinking about climate change and more likely they’re preparing for the oncoming squirrel insurrection. Running AI models on cat meows won’t likely tell us anything except how felines are plotting all of our deaths.

 

And even if liberals could suddenly understand what animals were saying, there is no guarantee the animal kingdom would skew to the left. For instance, more than anything, dogs value freedom. This is why, even though you provide them with food, water, and shelter, they bolt out the door as soon as you crack it an inch. Later, Comrade!

 

Fittingly, elephants are also famously conservative, as they respect both their elders and tradition. Studies have shown that elephants lead stoic, deliberative lives and pass their knowledge down from generation to generation. Roughly 100 percent of pachyderms would be Mitt Romney voters.

 

Other animals definitely lean liberal, as they value the collective more than individualism. Look no further than bonobos, which primatologist Frans de Waal called a “female-centered, egalitarian species . . . dubbed the ‘make-love-not-war’ primate.” And these hippies of the jungle do make a lot of love; order is largely kept through the granting and withholding of sexual favors.

 

Private equity billionaire Jeremy Coller is so sure that AI is “the new frontier of interspecies understanding,” he’s willing to set the year 2030 as the date when “we will crack the code.” Keep in mind, self-driving cars were “two years away” for a decade; now we’re getting a hard deadline on Dr. Dolittle.

 

Sadly, for progressive scientists, Orwell’s Animal Farm will have to remain on the fiction bookshelf. The whole enterprise assumes animals will have interesting, sympathetic things to say. What if we crack the code and it turns out goats are mostly just complaining about the neighbors and asking each other for money?

 

Treating animals as people sets up all sorts of quandaries. When ducks are able to march to defund the police, do we book them on MS NOW? If we give giraffes the right to vote — with photo ID, of course — how will we maintain the privacy of the voting booth?

 

In fact, when we begin to anthropomorphize monkeys, we might even elect a chimpanzee president. (There is ample evidence we already have.)

 

Will sentient animals suddenly have privacy rights? Americans can’t even figure out the proper use of Flock cameras for humans, much less an actual flock. (Much of the original frenzy over talking animals came from a study in which thousands of birds were outfitted with microphones, which is simply proof that everyone has a podcast these days.)

 

Some of the scientists arguing that all this AI testing on animals amounts to torture have a point. One test features a zebra finch jumping around “frantically” trying to have a conversation with a chirping cartoon projected on a screen, which may either be a scientific breakthrough or the saddest Tinder date in the animal kingdom.

 

Other scientists are worried that talking to animals might lead humans to play tricks on them. Biologist Vittorio Baglione said that hunters could use his research to seduce a crow by saying, “Come, it’s safe,” then blowing it out of the sky.

 

But this has always been the case — what is fishing bait if not a simple ruse to lure a hungry carp? There was never a concern in Bugs Bunny cartoons when Bugs would lure his nemesis out of his hiding place by dressing as a sexy woman. In fact, when animals can talk, one could actually catfish a real catfish. (Presumably, the fish would jump in your boat and yell, “I thought you were Margot Robbie!”)

 

All of this seems like a bright violation of Chesterton’s fence — the idea that we shouldn’t change any rule, system, or tradition unless we understand why it was there in the first place. Disrupting the balance between humans and animals could have catastrophic consequences, and not because you’d see llamas doing podcasts with Hasan Piker.

 

In the end, we don’t need armadillos to spout mindless leftism. We have Mark Ruffalo for that.