Bow Wow°•°

I am so sick of seeing animal talk transcribed with human punctuation marks. None of them apply. When animals speak—excepting owls, of course—they are not making statements, exclaiming or asking questions in the human sense of all these verbalizations. They are vocalizing in their own unique way, much like boiling steam kettles or thunder on the plain. Human punctuation marks, such as the periods, exclamation points and question marks used in English, are an inadequate indication of the import of a cat’s meowing, or a cows lowing (itself wrong transcribed as “moo” when it should be written more like “lygheauxgh”), or the Asian open-bill stork’s hey-mring-mrinking. I call for the development by zoophilologists of a panspecies animal speech punctuation system NOW.

Until one is invented, I use two degree marks, one on either side of a bullet, because they look like animal eyes glowing in the dark and an open mouth.