``But there are mistakes and mistakes, some worthier than others.
Wittgenstein, for example, made the most interesting mistake about
animals I have ever come across.  At the end of _Philosohical
Investigations_, he said that if a lion could talk, we wouldn't
be able to understand him.  There is a minor mistake of fact here -
since lions do talk to some people, and are understood - married to
another mistake that is probably a consequence of the seductions of
the first-person plural, in addition to the ordinary mistaken tendency
of bookish types have to mystify animals (not, perhaps, in Wittgenstein's
case but in other cases), as if they were, like lovers and like gold,
more precious when uninterpretable.

``The scholar Richard Maxwell has pointed out to me one aspect of
the ``we'' of Wittgenstein's remark: The only instances of talking
animals that virtually any set of literate Americans and Europeans
all have experience of are the talking animals of children's books -
a power of communication that can be controlled, turned on and off
like electricity (you take a drug or eat a magic cookie, or Merlin
waves his wand).  These books vary enormously in their sophistication
about what communication means.  Some, such as _The Sword and the Stone_,
are of uncanny loveliness, and not only because T.H.White actually
knew something about training.  His is not an easy fantasy; The
Wart has to earn his knowledge of animals.  But most talking animals
in the usual run of story spring from arrangements that erase the
need to earn, work at, learn understanding.

``Wittgenstein wanted to dispel a fantasy about language - a
reasonable desire, but also one of heroic proportions that took him
inevitably to a lion that daunted reason.  That wasn't his mistake (if
so fastidious and powerful an image can ever be put in the category of
mere slippages in the gears and fears that mistakes are).  But what I
want to say just now is that in philosophy and in literature there are
lions and lions.  I can easily imagine some lion trainers I have known
reading Wittgenstein's remark and saying something along the lines of,
``What does he mean?  That if my lion Sudan started talking we would
stop being able to understand each other?'' And a lion trainer who
said that would be in his or her turn misunderstanding Wittgenstein,
whose remark, mistaken properly, is of course powerful support for
such claims as that Lion Trainers Are Almost Human - They Practically
Speak!

``It is easy to say, `There are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' but much, much harder
to say, as Wittgenstein does, with stunning precision in the
course of an almost miraculously exacting mistake, that there
are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in one's
philosophy - locating them by dreaming, in this case, of lions,
even as he mistakes lions for himself.''

   Vicki Hearne, _Animal Happiness_ p.167-
   _Common Knowledge_ II:2 Fall 1993, p.97