Virtually any dog can be trained to do wonderful things, wants to do wonderful things, wants to delight his or her owner, wants to do his or her best, yet abandonment had been the fate of each and every one of those marvelous dogs that Sy and I watched with such wonder. The trainers rescued many of them from pounds or shelters, some just before they were about to be euthanized. Others were simply found lost and wandering, such as one little female who was discovered as a puppy, frightened and alone on the streets of Kansas City.
These fabulous dogs had been misunderstood. I think of the little dog who, on her front feet with her hind legs in the air, stood on the upheld palm of her trainer’s hand. She was probably the first dog ever to do this seemingly impossible trick, but her former owner had tossed her out, much as we might toss unwanted clothing in the Salvation Army box with no concern about who, if anyone, would use the clothing next.
Once rescued, all these dogs learned to do things no dog had ever done before. Their ability astonished us. Their delight in performing overwhelmed us. When given a chance at happiness, these dogs rose from the ashes and reached for the impossible in concert with the humans who rescued them—a kind of ressurection that most us of thought was only for humans.
What’s in a Name?
— Sy —
On spring days, when normal people are listening to NPR or CDs or music from their iPods, I listen to the baby monitor.
We don’t have a baby; I got the device to tune in to the conversations among our chickens.
I bought it to listen for distress calls. Being a chicken in rural New Hampshire is risky business, thanks to foxes, coyotes, dogs, hawks, and a host of other predators. Our flock well knows this, and if anyone sees a predator, they call out to warn the others—and thanks to the baby monitor, their calls also summon me to the rescue.
They don’t yell out “predator.” Their calls are quite specific. Alarm calls announce not only the species of predator spotted but also its speed, size, and direction.
At Macquarie University in Australia, psychology professor Chris Evans and his wife, Linda, identified nearly thirty phrases the birds use to convey information to others in the flock. For instance, roosters enticing hens to food tell them when the food is especially tasty. The Evanses showed that a rooster calls at a faster rate when alerting his flock to their favorite food, corn, than when he is merely pointing out the discovery of their regular layer-mash ration.
But food and predators aren’t all that chickens talk about. They may also be talking about us.
At least they are at Melissa Caughey’s coop. She’s the author of A Kid’s Guide to Keeping Chickens, which won a Science Book and Film Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A science award for a book about chicken keeping? You bet. Observing her flock of ten at her chicken compound on Cape Cod, Caughey is conducting serious science—and making important new findings. She told me about her latest discovery when we met in Washington, DC, a couple of years ago, and it took my breath away.
Her flock has come up with a name for her.
“I was out there one morning, throwing scratch into the run,” she told me, when she noticed her eldest, six-year-old Oyster Cracker, “was talking to me in a different voice, one I’d never heard before.” Oyster Cracker wasn’t just uttering the greeting “Brup? Brup?”—a chicken hello. She certainly wasn’t saying, “Bwah, bwah, bwah.” (That’s chicken for “I’m about to lay an egg.” But Oyster Cracker had long since entered what Caughey calls “henopause.”) Oyster Cracker was clearly saying, with increasing emphasis and tempo until the final, higher note, like trumpet fanfare, “ba-Ba-BA-BAA!”
“It was quite regal sounding,” Caughey said, “almost like announcing the arrival of the queen!” And then Caughey noticed other hens would say it, too—only when they first caught sight of her. Hence her conclusion: “When they see me, they call my name.”
This is not the first time observers have documented animals using particular sounds to refer to approaching people. Arizona professor Con Slobodchikoff has documented that prairie dogs—gregarious ground squirrels—use specific sounds to communicate to others that a human has been spotted. (They also discuss the dangers of cats, badgers, hawks, and ferrets, as well as announce the comforting presence of harmless species like cows and pronghorns, who signal safety.) Not only that, but the little mammals can communicate what color shirt the human is wearing, whether he is tall or short, and even whether the human is carrying a gun! Matching sonograms of what the prairie dogs are saying with videos of their responses to different stimuli, Slobodchikoff was even able to discover that the chatty squirrels will invent new “words” on the spot to describe objects they haven’t seen before, like circles and triangles.
That’s different from endowing any specific individual with an actual name—like “Sue” or, for that matter, “ba-Ba-BA-BAA!” But other animals are known to use individual names. Scottish researchers at the University of St. Andrews announced in 2000 that dolphins have names for one another, which the researchers called “signature whistles.” Further studies in captivity in South Africa and in Florida, among other places, proved not only that dolphins invent names for themselves and others but that they will call out the names of loved ones when they are separated, just like you call your kids or friends when you are looking for them.
Big-brained mammals like dolphins aren’t the only ones to use names. In 2008 scientist Karl Berg discovered that wild parrots do, too. Green-rumped parrotlets of Venezuela use specific peeps to identify themselves and others. They can, in effect, call out to other parrots: “Hey, Jill, it’s Tom! Wanna go get some fruit?” Furthermore, Berg showed how the parrotlets get their names: Like us, their parents name them.
That parrots have names in the wild shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Parrots easily learn our language, for goodness’ sake; why shouldn’t they have their own? Everyone knows how smart dolphins are. As for prairie dogs, at least they’re mammals like us. But chickens? Too many people dismiss them as stupid.
That’s a big mistake. Chickens—like most animals—are much smarter than we give them credit for. Scientific experiments show they easily recognize the faces of at least a hundred different individual chickens; they remember the past and anticipate the future; they have excellent spatial memories.
Caughey believes that my flock may have a name for me, too—and that our hens probably have names for each other as well as for their humans. We wonder what other species do this: elephants, wolves, crows? What about fish? In coming years, we predict, we’re likely to hear similar discoveries about these animals.
“Animals will share their wisdom,” Caughey promised. “But you have to listen.”
As for me, I’m staying tuned to the baby monitor. I’ll let you know what I find out.
In the Snow
— Liz —
The amount of snow we have at times is hard on many animals, especially those who can’t store food or hibernate and those with short legs who must plow through the snow, forcing and stumbling as we do if we don’t use snowshoes. Such winters are hard for bobcats, coyotes, foxes, fishers, and the like, although lynxes with their wide feet do better.
Deer suffer despite their long legs and their ability to bound through snowdrifts. This takes much energy and spends many calories, of which deer in the winter find few. Their digestive systems go into winter mode, which helps them but won’t always sustain them. Some are overcome by weakness and they starve; when the snow melts we find their carcasses, usually a few bones in a circle of fur, the deer’s winter coat that a scavenging predator has torn away. Mother Nature isn’t always kind, but she’s always effective. If not for carcasses, many of the carnivores would starve.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I feed about twelve deer who live in the woods near my house. People are not supposed to feed deer. Even so, it’s my land and I’ll put corn on it three
times a day if I want to—the benefits and problems and my reasons for doing so are described in an earlier essay. By April the deer are still doing well, and the fawns they bear later are, too, and they all come the next winter for more.
Who else does well in a bad winter? Bears do if they’ve eaten enough to tide them through their hibernation. Overwintering birds do if they live near someone with a feeder. Squirrels and chipmunks do if no other animal steals the acorns they have stored for that purpose. Beavers do because they’ve brought branches to the ponds where they’ve built their houses and stuck the branches into the mud on the bottom of the ponds. In winter the beavers swim under the ice to bring branches back to their houses. Mice often live with them in their houses, as these houses are built near the shores of the ponds where mice can access them, just as they access our houses. I’m not sure what the mice eat. Perhaps they, too, have stored food, or perhaps the beavers drop scraps while they’re chewing.
But even without the use of someone else’s shelter, mice and voles do very well in winter. Not only do they cache enough food for the winter in different places but they make tunnels under the snow so they can reach their caches. And in these tunnels, predators can’t find them.
What about pets? My Chihuahua, mentioned in earlier essays, was a rescue dog, born in a southern city and raised in an apartment. He hated the cold, rain, and snow, and he stayed in the house using puppy pads for bowel and bladder relief and sleeping right next to me in bed under the covers, with never a thought about the outdoors. But then a big dog came to visit us. She’s a young Labradoodle, she loves the snow, and she was with us when I wrote this because her owners were away. She had impressed the Chihuahua, who wanted to go wherever she went, so he would follow her outdoors. In February, after a storm called the “storm of the century,” snow had piled up to our roof, so the Labradoodle would run up the pile and stand on the roof. She very much liked this because she could see for miles. The tiny Chihuahua didn’t quite dare follow, but he was thrilled by the sight of her up so high. When she’d come down from the roof, they’d visit the deer-feeding station, sniffing every footprint that every deer had left in the snow. This thrilled them both.
One day a deer was there, but on the far side of a snowbank. The snowbank was so high she didn’t see the dogs coming, but when they appeared, she bolted and they chased her. The little dog’s legs were so short that normally he’d sink to his belly with each step he tried to take, but the snow had a crust that supported him. I called the dogs back and the big dog came, but the tiny dog kept going. He normally does what I ask, but with all the snow and an enormous creature trying to escape from him, he felt wild. To chase a deer is a serious misdemeanor known as “running deer.” If a dog is caught at it, he can be destroyed, so I shouted. I was also afraid that the deer would turn on him and do him harm or even kill him, but on they ran until the deer was in the woods. Feeling he had done his job, he calmly trotted back. Who would dream that a tiny dog from an apartment in a southern city could be stimulated by heavy snow and another dog, however big, and wind up running deer?
Music for Animals
— Sy —
Often as my border collie and I drive to our favorite hiking areas and to playdates, we garner stares from pedestrians. Even when my car windows are tightly closed, it’s pretty obvious to whomever we pass that Thurber and I are howling together at the top of our lungs.
Appropriately, Thurber seems particularly inspired by the soaring notes of the song “Say Something” by A Great Big World. I used to sing along; but when Thurber joined in, I switched to howling. I love singing and particularly enjoy doing it with my dog. But recently I worried: Is he howling because he likes it, or because he can’t stand my soprano?
I consulted an expert on animals and music, University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor Emeritus Charles Snowdon, to find out. Do animals enjoy music, like we do? If so, what kind do they like?
Psychologist Snowdon first became interested in animals and music in 2008 when University of Maryland composer and cellist David Teie contacted him with an intriguing question: How does music affect us emotionally?
Teie realized he couldn’t answer his question using human subjects because all humans have already heard music, and their emotional response to any given piece could be associated with millions of other learned factors. But Snowdon had a captive colony of little monkeys called cotton-top tamarins, whose elaborate communication system he studied. None of the monkeys had ever heard music. Maybe they could be good test subjects.
Snowdon was intrigued. Previous studies of animals and music had been inconclusive. Many people swear their animals enjoy the same music they do. Farmers keep barn radios tuned to classical music to calm pigs and cows. Some owners claim their dogs like heavy metal music; others say their dogs love classical.
A 2013 Japanese study showed that goldfish could hear the difference between Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The fish quickly learned to bite on a red bead when they heard one composition but not when they heard the other. But did they like the music? And if so, how would we know?
Sensibly, Snowdon points out that animals, like people, approach what they like and ignore or retreat from what they don’t. But at home it’s hard to tell for sure if your dog likes heavy metal music. If he seems happy when you come home from work and put on your favorite CD, your dog might just be pleased to see you—or relieved that he can finally go outside to pee.
Teie and Snowdon took a novel approach. The first step, explains Snowdon, was “to evaluate music in the context of the animal’s sensory system.” Humans like music that uses human tones, tempi, and vocal ranges; we don’t even recognize music outside these ranges as music. (Whale researchers Katy and Roger Payne had to significantly speed up the songs of humpback whales to even figure out that these long, complex compositions were songs!)
Much of our music is too high or too low, too slow or too fast, for other species to enjoy. And many animals hear different ranges than we do. When Japanese researchers played Mozart to rats, the rodents ignored frequencies below 4,000 hertz. (And we, on the other hand, can’t hear their laughter—it’s above our threshold of hearing.)
Based on recordings Snowdon made of tamarins in the lab, Teie composed some music specifically for these monkeys. Typically, tamarin voices are high-pitched and fast-paced. But importantly, notes Snowdon, “David and I explicitly did not replicate the monkey sounds in the music.” Rather, they used the acoustic features he thought would lead to calming and arousal in general, and translated them into the frequency range and tempos that tamarins themselves use.
The tamarins responded powerfully. Tunes with soothing harmonic structure and legato notes produced calm. Those with short, sharp, dissonant notes created agitation. Teie and Snowdon published their results in 2009 in the British journal Biology Letters.
Lately, the duo has been working on music for cats. Cats vocalize about one octave higher than people. (Dogs’ voices, like dogs’ bodies, are far more variable than cats’; that’s one reason they chose cats, not dogs, for their latest experiment.) Teie based one song on the tempo of a cat’s purrs; the other featured a beat that mimicked the fast rhythm of a kitten suckling from its mother.
It might not sound that great to us (personally, I rather like it), but the forty-seven cats tested vastly preferred it to human classical music. When cat music played, the study subjects purred, walked toward the speaker, and some even rubbed against it. The classical music was ignored.
And what about my Thurber’s howling? Snowdon told me he doesn’t know for sure. But he notes that Wisconsin-based animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell has found that people of different languages as well as dogs of many breeds respond similarly to similar vocal tones: Short staccato sounds stop an action; descending slides are soothing. Wolves—dogs’ ancestors—howl (as his monkeys call) to proclaim and sustain group soli
darity. It may well be that Thurber and I are both having a blast, singing together the praises of our pack.
Animals Who Imbibe
— Sy —
“What’s the cheapest beer you sell?” my husband asked with an air of urgency at the state liquor store.
We weren’t college students planning a keg party. It wasn’t New Year’s Eve. The beer wasn’t even for human consumption. The beer in question was for our pig.
We discovered Christopher Hogwood’s fondness for beer his first summer as a piglet. My husband had been enjoying a cold one and offered Chris a taste. It turned out Christopher loved the stuff. Soon, whenever the pig saw anyone holding a bottle, he’d chase them until they surrendered and let him suck it dry. (This could prove quite intimidating once Hogwood topped 750 pounds.)
Keeping our pig in his favorite beverage, my husband became a familiar figure to the beer guys at the store. Each time he’d come in, they’d ask how much Chris weighed now, and with great interest tried to figure out how much he could drink before he became disorderly.
Even if our beer budget could have answered the question, we did not want to see a 750-pound pig with sharp tusks wandering around the yard tipsy. Christopher never got drunk. But plenty of other animals do.
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