from “Words”

All the while our dog Rusty took almost as many hours of reading and writing lessons as I did. He lay beside us listening or nuzzled our laps as Sandra and I studied, his tongue dripping on the page. Yet he never learned even the first letter. I tried briefer experiments with the cow, the billy goat, a pet raccoon, and a rabbit, with the same results. This did not fool me into supposing that animals are dumb, for I had seen all of them do amazing things; it merely convinced me that reading and writing must be our own best tricks. We couldn’t run as fast or jump as high, couldn’t hole up all winter underground, couldn’t make honey from flowers or dams out of sticks, couldn’t fly like birds or swim like fish, couldn’t do a thousand fabulous things the other animals could do; but we could read, we could write, we could name everything under the sun.