My mother used to talk to our animals. She and the cats, especially, would have these conversations where they'd complain about us kids:
"We're so hungry," Mom would say in her falsetto cat-voice. "Why haven't the girls fed us?"
Then she'd answer:
"I don't know, Kitties. They promised they'd take care of you, but I guess they just forgot."

It was the kind of sneaky, passive-aggressive thing that I hated when I was a kid. I mean, if the cats had a problem, why didn't they just come to us?
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And it didn't matter if the animal was appealing or not: Mom knew what it was thinking. I remember one day, I got so fed up. Mom was telling me that a spider in our yard had given her a dirty look, and I knew I had to try and put a stop to it.

"Mom," I said. "You shouldn't anthropomorphize spiders. They hate that!"
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