Talk to the Animals

Animal Communication Is Not Language

The gap between expressing emotion and sharing knowledge is a mystery. By Herbert S. Terrace, Ph.D.

In the lyrics of “Let’s Do It,” Cole Porter celebrated the diversity of signals that birds, bees, oysters, clams, sponges, and electric eels produce to attract mates. Those signals can be visual, auditory, tactile, chemical, or electrical. If Porter were to add a verse, he might also include silkworms, ants, and other species that indicate their interest in mating with pheromones.

But it’s not just about mating that animals signal. They also communicate about dominance, territoriality, fear, aggression, the presence of a predator, and the discovery of food. Because of the variety and richness of animal signals, some psychologists regard them as a form of language.

In some instances, animals do seem to name objects. Animal behaviorists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth showed that vervet monkeys emit one sound when spotting an eagle, another for a leopard, and a third when they see a snake.

Even bees can vary their signals. Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch showed that bees communicate the distance and direction they fly to find food. When food is close to the hive, a foraging bee performs a circle dance, the diameter of which is proportional to the distance between the meal and the hive. If the food is far away, the foraging bee performs a dance composed of two intersecting circles. Where the circles touch, they produce a straight line. The angle of that line with the sun defines the direction in which others can find food.

As diverse and rich as these and other animal signals are, they are not language. The main reason: The signals are emotional. Their only function is to manipulate another animal’s behavior, not to exchange information. Without this function, animal signals don’t qualify as language.

As compared with words, animal signals are innate, immutable, and involuntary. A vervet monkey can’t arbitrarily substitute a new sound when it sees an eagle or the sounds it makes when it encounters other predators. Similarly, bees can’t arbitrarily change the dances they perform to signal the availability of food and how to find it.

By contrast, words are conversational and arbitrary. Upon seeing a flower, an infant learns to say flower to share her perception. She will point to the flower and smile after naming it. She expects a reply: What a pretty flower! Or, That’s a red one (which means Good job).

Animal signals, which are typically unidirectional, are never a conversation. A vervet monkey who sounds an alarm for a leopard doesn’t expect another monkey to say: Thanks, I’ve already seen it. Glad you told me anyway. In those rare instances in which one animal answers another animal’s signal, for example in bird duets, the answer is innate and immutable. It never adds new information.

Because words are arbitrary, they can be translated into any language. The infant who learned to say flower in English could just as well have said fleur in French, blume in German, flor in Spanish, fiore in Italian, and so on.

A chimpanzee can be trained to make a gesture in response to a particular object, say a flower, but she will do so only to obtain a reward. Such unidirectional imperatives form a minuscule part of language.

On the other hand, there is no limit to the number of words a person can learn. It has been estimated that college students know more than 40,000. As there are new objects or actions to name, people can increase their vocabulary, for example, with the names of new elements, stars, diseases, countries, and so on. Animal communication is entirely emotional, and the number of signals an animal can make is limited, rarely more than a dozen in a particular species.

The gap between language, which is arbitrary and infinitely flexible, and animal communication makes it seem impossible for language to have evolved from animal communication.

In Search Of The Genius Dog

Some gifted pooches are exceptional at learning words. By Mary Bates, Ph.D.

Every dog is a good boy or girl, but a few may also be geniuses. A study shows that some extraordinarily gifted dogs can learn the names of up to 12 new toys in just one week and that they remember the names for at least two months.

The project started when Claudia Fugazza and Ádám Miklósi, at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, met a dog named Whisky from Norway; her owner claimed she knew the names of her toys. Although skeptical at first, the researchers tested Whisky, and she demonstrated an impressive vocabulary.

This inspired the researchers to attempt to train dogs to learn the names of objects. Although the team spent three months training 36 dogs, they had very little success. Even after intensive training, most dogs were not able to learn multiple object names.

For the new study, the research team searched for dogs with an existing vocabulary. In addition to Whisky, they found five more dogs, from Hungary, Brazil, the Netherlands, the United States, and Spain. These six dogs each knew the names of more than 28 toys, with some knowing more than 100. They demonstrated this knowledge by successfully retrieving each toy upon the owner’s request when the toy was placed in a different room, out of the owner’s view, among other named toys. Interestingly, all six of the dogs are border collies. The team has since identified a handful of other “genius” dogs. Border collies are well-represented in this group, but it also includes a German shepherd, a Pekinese, a mini Australian shepherd, and a few mutts. Overall, it seems that the ability to learn object names is rare in dogs and occurs only in a few gifted individuals.

Dogs appear to be much better at understanding human communication signals than other animals, including great apes and wolves. The domestication process, in which humans specifically selected dogs for their ability to understand human communication, has likely contributed to their superior abilities.

Communicating In the Deep

Interspecies communication is more difficult when animals are far apart on the family tree. but that doesn’t stop them from trying. By Justin Gregg, Ph.D.

Living in the ocean creates a strange set of obstacles and opportunities when it comes to communication. It robbed dolphins, for example, of their ability to smell their friends. Over the course of millions of years, natural selection transformed their nasal opening into a blowhole on the top of their head. What was once the nostrils of their ancestors is now a set of elastic tissue deep inside their head that produces sound, similar to vocal cords. There are no olfactory sensors left to “taste” the air, which means that dolphins, unlike humans, can no longer use smell to communicate.

Humans use smell to transmit subconscious information about identity; we can unconsciously tell the difference between our friends and family members based on their odor. And we are attracted to people via smell, denoting a histocompatible sexual match for us. We can unconsciously tell whether people are scared or sad or ovulating by the way they smell. For ocean-dwelling dolphins, the ability to recognize friends (and their emotional states) by smell has been replaced by another sense, one that works better in an aquatic environment: taste. But dolphins don’t lick their friends as a means of communication. Instead, they taste their urine.

Jason Bruck and colleagues at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas explored whether dolphins react to the urine of their friends the same way they react to the sound of their friend’s signature whistles. Signature whistles are unique sounds that a dolphin makes, functioning like a name. When a dolphin hears its friend’s signature whistle, it will pause and listen longer than if it hears the whistle from a stranger. Bruck’s results showed that dolphins behave in similar ways when tasting their friend’s urine, holding their mouth open a bit longer than normal and letting the urine-water slosh around in the mouth.

Tasting your friend’s urine is a wholly foreign way for humans to communicate and really only works in watery environments, but not all communication systems under the waves are so unfamiliar to us. For example, our aquatic mammalian cousins, like sea lions, whales, and manatees are all tactile animals, like humans, with sensitive skin that makes caressing pleasurable. This shared communication channel is why humans have been visiting the friendly gray whales of Laguna San Ignacio in Mexico since the 1970s. These whales eagerly swim up to small tourist boats where people lean over the side to stroke, scratch, hug, and even kiss them. By all accounts, both the whales and the humans enjoy this mutually understood form of tactile communication that seems to convey the message: We mean you no harm; let’s be friends.

Interspecies communication becomes more difficult the farther apart on the family tree two species are. It seems unlikely that a human and an ocean-dwelling invertebrate cephalopod like an octopus would have much to talk about. But as filmmaker Craig Foster showcased in the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher, human-
octopus communication unquestionably exists.

In the film, Foster visits an octopus daily, gaining its trust, which eventually leads to interspecies communication in the form of tactile exchanges. The octopus gently reaches out to caress, or perhaps more accurately taste, Foster’s hand through her suckers. Octopus suckers have chemoreceptors allowing them to poke their arms in crevices to locate their prey by tasting them.

Foster even picks up his octopus friend who seems to not just tolerate but even seek out this tactile affection. Despite the vast evolutionary gulf between humans and cephalopods, we share a basic understanding of communication when it comes to the intended message of a gentle touch.

From Touch to Speech

When most people think of communication, we think not of touch but of speech. This is because language itself evolved to occur primarily over the auditory channel. Since sound travels more than four times faster in water (1,480 meters per second) than in air (343 meters per second), it’s no surprise that a huge number of marine animals also use sound as an efficient means of communication. The low-frequency sounds produced by larger whales—blue whales, fin whales, humpback whales—can travel tens of thousands of miles underwater, gently bouncing from the equator to Antarctica. Many species of fish use sound for communication: attracting mates, defending territory, or deterring predators and rivals by making thump, grunt, and chirp sounds.
The ocean is chock-full of marine animals exploiting the auditory channel for communication, but this may be changing. Thanks to human-made noise, the ocean sounds very different than it did millions of years ago. In our quest to both decipher and establish communication with marine species, we have become our own worst enemy. Ship noise, military sonar, dredging, wind farms, and oil and gas drilling—all these activities are creating a cacophony of sound in the ocean. Too much noise makes it difficult for fish to attract mates and deter enemies or for whales to hear those low-frequency calls as they now must compete with the constant hum of shipping traffic.
Jason Bruck and other researchers have refocused their attention from the communicative properties of dolphin pee to the problem of ocean noise. They are currently looking at how even seemingly minimal amounts of background noise—like the motor of a jet ski or the drone of an outboard motor, for example—might make it difficult not only for dolphins to communicate with each other but also to concentrate long enough to learn new skills.
Paige Stevens is investigating the ways in which anthropogenic noise affects dolphins’ ability to learn critical survival behaviors. Just as we see in humans, distracting background noise may make it difficult for dolphins to focus on the task at hand. Stevens’ research could reveal that it’s getting so loud in the ocean that dolphins might be losing their ability to think clearly enough to live a normal life.
Humans feel a strong pull to communicate with ocean animals, be it an octopus, a whale, or a dolphin. And we have enough in common with most species in terms of shared communication channels to make this possible, even if it’s just a gentle stroke of the fin or being caressed by an octopus sucker. It’s noble to want to establish communication with our favorite ocean denizens, but unless we find a way to turn down the volume, we won’t ever hear what they might want to tell us.

For the Love Of His Human

How a dog faced his greatest fear. By Stanley Coren, Ph. D.

At 7 weeks, Rocky was given to a boy with emotional problems. Unfortunately, the boy was jealous of the dog. He put him in a pillowcase, tied a knot, and threw him into a lake in Upstate New York. Horrified, the boy’s father rescued the dog. However, the next day, the boy tried to drown Rocky again. He took the dog and held him underwater. The dog was rescued once more by the father and promptly returned to the breeder.

Later, Rocky was given to Rita when he was 10 weeks old, and they immediately bonded. Called R and R by the family, the two were always within reach of each other.

Once, when Rita was about to enter a store, two large men dressed in biker gear burst out of the door, yelling at the shopkeeper, and nearly knocking Rita over. Rocky rushed forward, putting himself between the girl and the two men. He growled in a low rumble, and the men backed off.

He seemed fearless most of the time. But Rocky’s terror of water was evident when Rita went swimming in a nearby lake. He would pull back in distress, pace on the shore, and tremble.

When he was 3 years old and Rita was 11, she fell off a boardwalk and into the lake face-down. Her body was not moving. We can never know what went through Rocky’s mind as he stood there watching his keeper, but he leaped forward and into the water. He swam to Rita, grabbed her dress strap, swam back to shore, and dragged her out.

Rocky’s fear of the water was absolute and never did abate. He continued to avoid it for the rest of his life, and no one ever saw him so much as place a foot in the lake again. He braved the water just once, for Rita, for love.

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