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TikTok animal speaking
Screengrabs via @monika.chupekova

‘Just like a Disney princess’: Royalty in the making discovers handy hack to speak to animals

Learning the customs, however, is a whole other ball game.

Imagine for one second if the world at large suddenly gained the ability to communicate with animals the way we communicate with each other, complete with geologically-sensitive linguistic stylings, euphemisms, accents, and platitudes.

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The unprecedented novelty of it all would be sensational, but at some point, we’d have to deal with the political impact of that brave new world. And, judging by how severely that ball is being dropped as is, it’s safe to say we wouldn’t survive in such a climate.

As such, perhaps it’s a good thing that our animal communication skills are physiologically limited to simple commands for our pets, troll-adjacent repetition from parrots, and generally generous interpretations of how animals respond to our presence. Because of this, animal communication can remain the novelty that it is, and such practitioners like TikTok‘s @eweltattoo only need to worry about laughing at it.

And what a laugh-worthy occasion it was in the 15-second video above (posted by Ewel’s pal @monika.chupekova). You see, Ewel, at some point before this recording, likely made a phonetic connection between the sound that humans make when they gargle water, and the sound that turkeys make when they yell at things. Being in the presence of turkeys at that moment, Ewel decided to take a sip from her water bottle so as to gargle the contents, just to see what the turkeys make of it.

Sure enough, the bubbly drone from Ewel’s throat was enough for the turkeys to claim kinship with her, and a rousing wave of gobbles quickly left their throats in response, causing Ewel to do a rare legitimate spit-take on account of her laughter.

Now, hear me out for a moment; what if these turkeys weren’t gobbling in solidarity with Ewel, but instead protesting at the offensive stereotype she so boldly displayed in their presence? A much-circulated notion, after all, claims that domesticated turkeys are so stupid, that if they’re left outside during a rainstorm, they’ll stare at the sky with their mouths open and drown. Indeed, was Ewel mocking this gaggle of Thanksgiving staples?

If so, she’s about as uninformed as any other bigot out there. Snopes noted all the way back in 1999 that there are several logical fallacies and stretched truths that make up this claim about turkeys. Firstly, turkeys cannot “look up” in the purest sense, as their two eyes are positioned on opposite sides of their head so as to enhance their field of vision at the cost of binocular vision (meaning the ability to focus both of their eyes on the same thing). In other words, they would gain no information about the rain by looking up. Moreover, the lower mental capacity of turkeys means that they’re unable to take an interest in the rain in the first place, and so they would have no reason to look up anyway.

Turkeys have been known to die in the rain, but this is largely due to the fact that domesticated turkeys have been bred in captivity for long enough that their survival instincts have dimmed significantly. As a result, an event as simple as a storm can send the turkeys into a panic, and they may trample and suffocate one another to death as they helplessly try and flee.

Indeed, it’s a good thing animals can’t participate in society with the rest of us. Could you imagine having so little compassion for your fellow man, that something as inconsequential as a rain storm could lead you to disregard their lives to the point of their death? Certainly not us humans; we’re far too civilized for that, yes siree.


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Author
Image of Charlotte Simmons
Charlotte Simmons
Charlotte is a freelance writer for We Got This Covered, a graduate of St. Thomas University's English program, a fountain of film opinions, and probably the single biggest fan of Peter Jackson's 'King Kong.' She has written professionally since 2018, and will tackle an idiosyncratic TikTok story with just as much gumption as she does a film review.