One of Google’s April Fool tricks on the world this year was its announcement that it now had an app that translated animal sounds into English. A video showed a company rep and a farmer recording sounds and hearing a “translation” in a female British voice. (A sheep complained about the farmer’s “dress sense”, a chicken asked him if he’d done something new with his hair, and a cow claimed she’d figured out the meaning of life.)

It goes to show how much we want something like this to be possible. We wish we could communicate with animals, even if all they have to say, like a pig in the Google video, is “Clean person. Smells good.” (Remember the dogs in Up, who had collars that translated their barks? They produced only simple sentences, often interrupted by “Squirrel!”) After all, research shows that dogs can understand up to 250 of our words. Why shouldn’t it work the other way around?

Well, for one thing, I suspect animals experience a lot of things we wouldn’t understand even if they could convey them to us – we just don’t have the senses they do.

Still, we keep trying to find a way to let them talk to us – or at least to let ourselves pretend they do.

This fall, Mattel will start selling Puppy Tweets, a gadget you can clip to a dog’s collar that will post on Twitter every time the dog moves or barks. The tweet will be just one of 500 random messages like “I bark because I miss you.” You’ll know your dog is doing something, that’s all.

The Japanese are way ahead of us on this (surprise) and have come up with an app called BowLingual that actually categorizes dogs’ barks into “sad, frustrated, needy, happy, self-expressive and on guard” and matches them with sentences. It’ll be available this summer.

But for now, real animal translators are still just an April Fool’s joke.