The human capacity for language enables us to philosophise upon the lives of animals and plants, but also has the power to cast non-humans as an ‘other’ (as commented in this post). Despite humanity’s reliance on non-humans for existence, we are quick to denigrate them as something below us. Perhaps the lack of a shared language is to blame, where our inability to communicate our thoughts directly with each other creates a barrier to empathy. However, bridging the distance caused by the lack of language shared between man and animal is animism, as argued by Nurit Bird-Daivd. Animism provides an interface for a deeper understanding with non-humans, where the modes of being of other animals can be recognised.

“Talking” is a short-hand for a two-way responsive relatedness with a tree—rather than “speaking” one way to it, as if it could listen and understand. “Talking with” stands for attentiveness to variances and invariances in behaviour and response of things in states of relatedness and for getting to know such things as they change through the vicissitudes over time of engagement with them. To “talk with a tree” —rather than “cut it down”—is to perceive what it does as one acts towards it, being aware concurrently of changes in oneself and the tree. It is expecting response and responding, growing into mutual responsiveness and, furthermore, possibly into mutual responsibility. (77)

Rather than futilely attempting to talk with a tree using our human language, we create a conversation by keeping track of the way our actions affect the other. This cycle, where one influences the other, which causes the other to influence us, is a unique language that is created through the intra-actions of humans and non-human.

Our failure to recognise the ways in which non-human nature is trying to speak to us can lead to devastating consequences. Animals are unable to speak against how they are perceived as inferior to humans. This is a still from 1958 documentary White Wilderness, which is infamous for creating the myth that lemming commit mass suicide as a means of mitigating over-population. The reality was that the lemmings were pushed off the cliff by the film producers. It reveals human’s extraordinary ability to impose their own narratives onto non-human nature, which is easy due to their silence and inability to argue. 

This video, titled The Turning Point, by Steve Cutts defamiliarizes the way in which we see ourselves; a way to view ourselves through the eyes of an animal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7LDk4D3Q3U

Works cited:
Bird-David, Nurit. “'Animism Revisited': Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology, vol. 40, no. 1, 1999, pp. 67–91, doi:10.1086/200061.