People talk all the time. With their mouths, eyes, bodies. So do animals. Communication is so important that even the amoeba, an organism made up of a single cell, communicates with other amoebas. Chimpanzees greet each other by touching hands. Male fiddler crabs wave their giant claws to attract female crabs. White-tailed deer communicate danger by flicking their tails. Dogs stretch their front legs out in front of them and bow when they want to play. Giraffes press their necks together with love. Gorillas stick out their tongues to show anger. Kangaroos thump their hind legs to warn others of danger. Prairie dogs bare their teeth and press their mouths together to discover if they are friends or foes. Swans entwine their long necks to fight. Horses rub noses as a sign of affection.
But do animals talk in complex ways?
For hundreds of years it suited humans to believe that even if animals talked it was to convey immediate information: I want food, I want sex, I am angry, run from the predator etc. Now researchers find that animal communication is far more layered and subtle and that the same gesture may have multiple distinct meanings depending on the situation. For example, even a dog’s tail wag has so many meanings including: excitement ,anticipation ,playfulness ,contentment, relaxation, anxiety ,questioning, reassurance ,brief acknowledgement, statement of interest, uncertainty, apprehension ,submissive placation . Combined with other body gestures such as yawns, direction of vision each one means something different.
Birds sing. So do whales. Monkeys and frogs jabber continuously. So do chickens. But is it “proper language? A recent development is the discovery that the use of grammar and the ability to produce “sentences”, is not limited to humans . The first scientifically acceptable evidence of syntax came in 2006 from the Greater Spot-nosed Monkey of Nigeria. The language consists of separate words which when sequenced together in sentences means something different. A sound like ‘pyow’ warns against a leopard and, and ‘hack’ is used when an eagle is nearby. However three pyows with four hacks means lets go . Two pyows with five hacks means something else. A dog’s range of vocal sounds—barks, growls, howls, whines, and yelps would probably form sentences as well.
A Swedish study from Uppsala University, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences, shows birds have evolved complex and sophisticated talk patterns as well. Siberian jays mob predators into leaving. But before doing that they use over a dozen different calls to communicate the level of danger and predator category to other members of their own group. Some are specific for owls and other for hawks and contain information as to where the predator is and what the level of risk is and how many birds are needed. A University of Washington study has found that the chickadees’chick-a-dee-dee-dee calls contain a surprising amount of information. For instance when they see flying hawks, owls and falcons they issue a soft, high-pitched call. However, when they see a stationary or perched predator, chickadees use a loud, wide-spectrum chick-a-dee-dee-dee alarm to recruit other birds to harass the predator and chase it away. Chickadees change the dee-dee-dee note at the end of the calls, sometimes adding five, 10 or 15 dees. These additional words describe the size and threat of the predator - a pygmy owl or a great horned owl for instance. .
Orcas learn dialects which vary from pod to pod. When orcas interact with one another they improvise melodic phrases they seldom if ever repeat again. In humans its called language.
The waggle dance of the bee is not a simple gesture. It is as complex as any human communication. The bee communicates sun position, a system of measure and precise direction. It the desirability of a food source denoting a syntax composed of adjectives and adverbs. One waggle communicates the location of standing water which is used to cool an overheated hive . Another alerts the bees that their hive is irreparably damaged. They are directed to commence a swarm. In effect the dancer says, “ Gather round, Most of us need to form into a search party. We’ll leave tomorrow at sun up, fly off in every direction. Our mission is to locate a new hive cavity. Whoever finds an appropriate site, send out a pheromone to signal the rest of us. We’ll pass the word around, and delegate some individuals to inspect it. If you all agree, we’ll start constructing the new hive immediately. But some of you need to stay behind. You have the critical job of protecting the queen. When the new hive is built, you can transport her to our new home”.
In the 1920s, South African naturalist, Eugene Marais studied termites and ants, concluding that the tasks of the group were communicated through a mechanism comprising syntax and vocabulary. If termites were brought to a nest further away, the newcomers were always killed, implying that the new group spoke a “foreign language”. Ants communicate alarm, invite friends to eat from a new food source and organize military tactics when attacking an enemy, to mention a few communications observed by zoologists.
In response to the sight of weasel invading the coop, a bantam hen emits a high-pitched “Kuk-kuk-kuk”. If the invader is a hawk circling overhead, she’ll shriek a single long note. In 1980 biologists discovered that vervet monkeys in Kenya also possess a vocabulary. A certain grunt is the actual word for eagle. When it is vocalized, all the vervets in earshot scan the sky. A bark means leopard, prompting the monkeys to scamper to the top of a tree. Other sounds express territoriality, kinship, and social standing. As in human languages, meaning varies depending on who is speaking. When a vervet infant screams out the word signifying a certain predator, only its mother responds directly. Until these discoveries, linguists insisted that the use of sounds as symbols (i.e. words) was a unique trademark of human communication.
Alex, the African gray parrot understood the meaning of colour, shapes, objects, and numbers. Alex also connected words together to communicate and satisfy his own curiosity, learning the words “carrot” and “orange” by asking a researcher eating a carrot what color it was and what it was called. Alex’s achievement demonstrated that consciousness is not limited to us.
Bottlenose dolphins whistles are so sophisticated that they convey their own names and everything else in a series of whistles .Gregory Bateson, who spent years with dolphins, wrote that their language is not a sterile collection of things and functions but a dynamic relationship bound together by communication with the concepts of syntax and grammar
Beluga whale chirp and chortle producing hundreds of different sounds. Their discourses are like a raucous party with the revelers talking coherently to one another. Elephants talk with a combination of sound and body language signals that range from low frequency rumblings to high frequency trumpets, roars, bellows, barks and snorts. Although lions are not renowned for their small talk, research shows that they are excellent communicators. A male’s roar is a warning that freezes a prey or a male rival in its tracks. But lions are social cats, they also roar just to keep in touch with the other members of the pride. This type of roar is softer and less assertive. One researcher reported a lion that was heard roaring every 15 minutes until his cousin answered. The chit chat continued for 15 minutes until they finally met up to hang out, after which the roaring stopped.
The idea of animals holding an abstract conversation meets with an innate resistance in scientists. It is easier to objectify them so that you can use and eat them. But with every passing hour, we learn that they have every attribute we do. Koko the gorilla learnt 2000 words of spoken English. As her language skills increased, her ability to communicate emotions and concepts leapt far beyond the mastery of words. She even learned to tell lies, so far thought a uniquely human trait. When Koko was asked by a journalist if she was an animal or a person, her response was “fine animal gorilla.”
As Jim Nollman says in his book The Charged Border: Where Whales and Humans Meet. “The practices of traditional culture confirm the virtues of interdependence. Native people observed other species closely, seeking practical insight to help meet their own life challenges. Unhampered by the hierarchal organization that positions one species above or below another, they had great freedom to learn from every species. By contrast, our anthropocentric society has not yet learned that the prevailing “separate but not equal” worldview is killing the planet and us along with it".
One day eating animals will be regarded as cannibalism.
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