Granted. You can talk to and understand animals because you are now as intelligent as an animal. The centers of your brain responsible for language and higher thought have devolved. Your speech is no longer productive or recursive. You can only utter the same ten or so isolated cries that express extremely simple emotions like fear and anger or bodily needs like hunger. You are no longer capable of symbolic thought or imagination. You can’t even count past four.

But it’s not all bad. Your crippling existential dread is gone. You live in the moment, incapable of dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. Your hierarchy of needs extends no further than adequate shelter and food, no need for self-actualization since you barely have a self to actualize. You are still a creature that needs to be selfish and occasionally violent to survive, but you’re no longer burdened by moral guilt, as you are incapable of conceiving of being anything else. Life must take life to endure. You either survive or you don’t, simple as that.

Congrats! You can now talk to and understand human animals in any language you already knew!

Granted but Sea of Trolls style. Birds never shut the fuck up and constantly annoy you with their inane conversations.

The talking is the easy part. It’s the understanding that really takes its toll. You understand what it is to be an animal. You understand why they engage in coprophagia and cannibalism and start to see their merits. Maybe you’ll give them a try. You understand the terror of being prey. But what finally breaks your mind is understanding the world in a different timeframe. It starts out small: a talkative dragonfly hovers around you for ten minutes and your brain takes in an hour’s conversation in that time, all of it inane dragonfly ramblings. This happens any time you’re around flying insects. You feel like things take too long. You lose connection with your body as even walking takes effort to concentrate through each step. Thankfully breathing isn’t conscious by default. Eating is an absolute chore. Speaking becomes difficult. As your ability to communicate deteriorates, you have to watch your life fall apart in slow motion while those stupid flies and mosquitoes constantly chatter while they buzz about your ever unwashed body, itching for an eternity.

Granted. You can now talk to and understand animals, but it turns out that none of them actually want to talk to you.

Granted!
You can now understand exactly one animal-species. You dont know which one, and a short experiment revealed to you that it isnt humans.

They are constantly catcalling or insulting.

Done, but you find that most of them are not interested in human things, or if they are interested in such things, they do not have the human frame of reference or standards.

For example, if you ask a robin to find a shiny coin and bring it back to you, it will not understand why you would want this or why it should do this, and simply ignores you on the grounds that you are not providing it with food, sex, or territory, and so it has no reason to continue the discussion.

More abstractly, if you were to, for example, ask an owl about the weather, its criteria for whether the weather is good or not is simply based on how good it is for finding prey. It does not care about temperature, wind, or humidity in the same way that you do.

“Monsieur, I need to poop!”

Granted. You find out that a single pigeon has been stalking you, has been the only bird that keeps shitting on your car, knowing it annoys you. You end up having a public argument with this pigeon wherein everyone around you tjinks you’re insane because you’re the only one who can understand the pigeon.

Your family have you incarcerated. While you’re locked away in the psychiatric ward, the pigeon frequently visits you, hanging around just outside your window, taunting you.

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