Sean Carroll

I don't know what to tell you.

We don't live in a universe that makes that one easy.

Brandon Lewis says I've long known that cats express emotions through their tails, but I've often assumed that their emotions just kind of leaked out this way.

Recently, I heard it described as a tail language, which got me wondering how intentional do you think cat tail movement is?

Are cats consciously in control of their tail movement?

How much tail expression do you get from Ariel and Caliban?

I would be very skeptical about tail language as a concept.

You know, you have to be clear.

There's all sorts of ways in which animals, and human beings for that matter, communicate without language as such, right?

I think that language should not be thought of as synonymous with communication, okay?

You can get your point across without using language sometimes.

I think that's what animals generally do.

I think we should...

to maintain the idea of language for something symbolic, right?

Something that is also modular, can be put together in different ways and form complex thoughts, which I don't think many animals actually do.

Maybe some of them do, and that's, you know, a thing that we can study.

We've talked about it here on the podcast, and it's an intricate...

difficult thing.

But I don't think that Ariel and Caliban are putting together complex thoughts with their little walnut-sized brains and expressing them through their tails.

It is true that cats' tails are very expressive.