This article is an adapted version of the 2023 David Buchan Memorial Lecture. Humans, animals, and plants talk to each other in songs, stories, legends, and other forms of creative expressions encompassed in the term folklore. This distinguishing feature of folklore is mostly perceived as merely fantastic, or even unrealistic. This article re-evaluates it from perspectives based in current human–animal studies and new scientific understanding of the non-human beings, and finds that folk narrative texts present an ecological consciousness in which humans and non-human animals communicate, fight, and cooperate with each other. This multi-species world, based on inter-species communication, has played a role in the making of human–animal relationships in different cultures and can also play a role in healing what the author calls our agonized ecology.
Sadhana Naithani (Tue,) studied this question.