Op/Ed

Ways of Seeing: Animals have their own languages

ERIN RUBLE

It’s dangerous to speak too freely around this house. Drop an unguarded “walk” or “go out” and our collie, sleeping peacefully by the fire, transforms into a leaping, barking maniac. Say “treat” in the wrong tone of voice and he’ll caper in front of you like a circus clown.

His word recognition starts to fall off a bit there. His ability to understand “come” is inversely proportional to the number of other dogs, birds or joggers in the neighborhood, and he’s never mastered “leave the cat alone.”

(This kind of difficulty besets humans, too. Our son, at age four, could reel off dinosaur names seven syllables long, but the otherwise straightforward words “clean,” “up,” “your” and “toys” lost all meaning when strung together in a sentence.)

It has always struck me as bizarre that for decades, many influential scientists utterly refused to believe that animals had emotions or conscious intention, much less that they could communicate in a way not wholly driven by instinct. Anyone who tried to demonstrate the opposite risked ridicule and professional side-lining for “anthropomorphizing” — since, according to the received wisdom, thinking and feeling were purely human qualities. (Apparently, no Serious Gatekeeper Scientist was also a dog lover.)

The irony, of course, is that most researchers expected animals to prove their intelligence by using our language, while the scientists themselves often didn’t even try to understand the animals’ own communication. Who’s smarter, the border collie or parrot that picks up a few human words, or the human who never learns to speak even a little Parrot or Dog?

To be fair, humans couldn’t even hear a lot of the patterns that birds or elephants or whales use, not until artificial intelligence started picking it apart for us.

But now that we have the tools to look into this, and the rigid belief in human exceptionalism is gradually easing, more and more research is coming out showing just how much animals do say. Elephants, for instance, appear to have names. If you play back the right rumble to the right elephant, she’ll perk up and say something back. Dolphins and parrots name themselves, too. In fact, parrots’ monikers are elaborate, identifying not just the individual but also her gender and flock.

And it doesn’t stop there. If you approach a prairie dog town, they’ll talk about you to each other: what color shirt you’re wearing, whether you’re short or tall, and whether you might be carrying a gun with you. Chimps and gorillas use all kinds of gestures with each other (to say things like “stop that,” “come here,” and “let’s go,” etc.), many of which humans use too. Parrots and cetaceans have regional dialects to their sounds, which have nothing to do with their genes and everything to do with whom they learned their calls from. Sperm whales have a kind of phonetic alphabet, which would allow them the same kind of flexibility in generating sounds that we have in creating words.

It’s not Beatrix Potter, with rodents in waistcoats remarking on the weather. Animals aren’t people, so they’re not any more likely to use human syntax and concepts than they are to pick up knives and forks to eat their dinner.

But saying that it’s anthropomorphizing to think of animals communicating gets it the wrong way round. If you believe in evolution, you realize we’re just another great ape. Our hands and eyes and backbones are just a tweaked version of the standard mammalian equipment; it stands to reason that our minds and social structures would be too. From this perspective, we should expect to find communication, emotion, cooperation and even practical jokes out in nature, even though they’re not going to look exactly like they do with us.

We’re just barely getting an inkling of what’s out there. Nobody understands most of what dolphins say, let alone elephants or whales. But if we dump this idea that it’s us vs. them, humans on one side and “nature” on the other, what amazing things could we learn?

Well, I for one would receive urgent messages from at least one individual to go on more walks. Preferably bringing treats. But then, I already do. Some communication is plenty clear.

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Erin Ruble is an immigration lawyer and aspiring amateur naturalist. She lives with her family in New Haven, where she occasionally finds opossums in the living room and mice in her shoes.

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