How to Listen to Our Animal Kin
Principles for nonhuman animal communication technologies.
Imagine a beloved animal—a cat, a dog, a horse or a bird. Now imagine you could speak into a hand-held device and talk directly to them, in terms you both would understand. What would you say? What might they say?
Once confined to the pages of science fiction, interspecies communication is quickly becoming a plausible prospect.
Once confined to the pages of science fiction, interspecies communication is quickly becoming a plausible prospect. The dawn of this new reality holds great potential, including extraordinary opportunities to enhance protections for the living world and to forge deeper connections with our animal kin. At the same time, it carries profound risks. Past transformative technologies offer cautionary tales; technologies designed to better understand nonhuman animals could also be weaponized to exploit and harm them.
Advancements in what we propose to call nonhuman animal communications technologies, or NACTs, are progressing rapidly. NACTs include tools and systems that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced robotics, and other methods to record, analyze, and potentially translate animal communications. Despite their risks, these technologies operate in a regulatory vacuum. There is an urgent need for shared principles and standards to guide this emerging field—guardrails that can prevent harm while enabling responsible development.
To help fill this gap, the NYU More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program has published a comprehensive framework of legal and ethical principles for NACTs. The framework comprises twelve principles organized under four pillars, which direct actors in the field to Prepare, Engage, Prevent, and Protect (PEPP) as they design, develop, and deploy these technologies.
Here, we provide a brief overview of the Framework and its key features. Before launching into that discussion, however, it is worth outlining the risks posed by NACTs that the Framework is designed to address and mitigate.
Risks
NACTs may radically alter human relationships with nonhuman animals and the larger living world. We identified four primary categories:
Physical risks include injury, exhaustion, illness, reproductive failure, and death of nonhuman animals. For example, even standard data collection techniques can cause discomfort, while widespread NACT use could increase harmful human-animal encounters, habitat disruption, and the weaponization of these technologies for poaching or exploitation.
Mental risks encompass cognitive confusion, anxiety, emotional distress, grief, and fear. Attempts at unilateral or bilateral communication—”talking back” to animals—could cause profound confusion or distress, including, for instance, if animals interpret artificial communications as originating from deceased community members.
Relational risks involve harmful impacts on social functioning, community structures, and habitual patterns. Acoustic pollution from NACTs, for instance, could disrupt certain animals’ ability to communicate and coordinate, weakening communal bonds and compromising their ability to hunt or care for young.
Ecological risks extend beyond individuals to entire ecosystems. Widespread NACT deployment could damage habitats, disrupt keystone species, interfere with critical ecological processes, and create cascading effects throughout interconnected living systems.
These risks are amplified by potential commercialization, military applications, and use by untrained actors—each of which could transform entire ecosystems into data-mining operations or surveillance zones.
The Framework rests on an ecocentric foundation that expands the circle of legal and moral concern to nonhuman beings.
The PEPP Framework
The Framework emerged from a multi-year research project combining risk analysis with examination of existing legal and ethical frameworks across multiple fields: animal welfare and research ethics, environmental law, data governance, corporate accountability, AI regulation, and others. Drawing from frameworks like the EU’s animal research directives, the Rio Declaration, and emerging AI governance standards, we developed principles tailored to NACT-specific challenges.
The Framework rests on an ecocentric foundation that expands the circle of legal and moral concern to nonhuman beings. Aligned with “more-than-human rights,” it rejects approaches that position humans as superior to other living beings or justify domination of the natural world. Given NACTs’ emergence against a backdrop of human manipulation and destruction of nonhuman life, the Framework adopts a precautionary approach designed to reverse, not entrench, destructive patterns.
The twelve principles are organized under four pillars:
Prepare: NACT actors must operationalize experimental design best practices and robust governance protocols. This includes adherence to the “3Rs” framework (replace, reduce, refine) and establishment of transparent ethics and data governance protocols before any technology deployment.
Engage: Diverse stakeholder consultation ensures implementation with expertise and equity. This entails meaningful engagement with independent scientific experts and, where possible, Indigenous communities and traditional knowledge-holders whose wisdom about nonhuman animals and ecosystems is essential.
Prevent: Embedding precautionary and risk management practices across the full NACT lifecycle promotes the prevention of harm. This includes comprehensive risk analysis and mitigation, with the burden of justification falling on those deploying these technologies.
Protect: Safeguarding the autonomy, best interests, and rights of all humans and nonhuman animals means, among other things, respecting non-coerced participation, prioritizing animals’ best interests, and ensuring urgent remediation of any harms that do occur.
As one illustrative example, under the Autonomy principle, researchers studying dolphin communications would need to develop species-specific guidelines for ensuring non-coerced participation. If dolphins show signs of distress or unwillingness to engage, researchers must immediately cease activities.
What’s Next?
The Framework is designed for gradual uptake. Initially, it serves as a voluntary commitment for research collectives and other NACT actors. As more actors adopt these principles, they can provide a common normative language for the field. Eventually, emerging norms could be incorporated into binding regulations at institutional, professional, and governmental levels.
At a moment of accelerating biodiversity loss and global warming, the PEPP Framework contributes to a larger dialogue seeking to ensure that technologies with potential to help us listen to our animal kin and reconnect with the more-than-human world do not become instruments of further harm. It provides a foundation for iterative development and global collaboration in service of human and nonhuman life, ecological integrity, and the responsible, compassionate pursuit of knowledge.
The PEPP Framework is open for endorsement at ouranimalkin.com. The full report, “Listening to Our Animal Kin: Legal and Ethical Principles for Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies,” is available at mothlife.org.
