We don’t know yet whether the prairie dogs ever use their calls to talk about things that aren’t present. But since other animals have used language to talk about things that aren’t present, there’s no reason to assume prairie dogs can’t do it, too. Some of the apes whom researchers have trained in English over the years have used their words to talk about food that was in another room and not visible, which is spatial displacement, and at least two of them have used signs to ask about animal companions who had been taken away from them to go to the vet. I think it’s unlikely that Dr. Slobodchikoff’s prairie dogs would have nouns, adjectives, verbs, semanticity, and productivity without also being able to use their calls to communicate about something that is not immediately present.
WHY PRAIRIE DOGS?
From what we know now, it seems prairie dogs’ ability to communicate may be greater than that of animals with more complex brains, including the primates. Why would prairie dogs develop more complex calls than the monkeys? Maybe because they had to. Prairie dogs are super-prey—there’s almost no meat eater in the vicinity of prairie dog burrows that doesn’t eat them. Dr. Slobodchikoff’s list of prairie dog predators is so long it has animals on it most people have never even heard of: “coyotes, foxes, badgers, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, ferruginous hawks, harriers [a kind of hawk], black-footed ferrets, domestic dogs, domestic cats, rattlesnakes, and gopher snakes.”23 For eight hundred years Native Americans hunted prairie dogs for food, and today humans hunt them for target practice and sport.
To make things worse, prairie dogs live in the same burrows for hundreds of years. That means every single predator in the vicinity knows exactly where to find them. It also means the prairie dogs get to know the local predators on an individual basis. All told, it’s likely prairie dogs are so vulnerable they had to develop a really good system of communication to survive as a species. Dr. Slobodchikoff speculates that instead of looking for animal language in our closest genetic relatives, the primates, we should look at animals with the greatest need for language in order to stay alive.
If he’s right, that’s probably another blow to the idea that human language is unique. If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what’s unique about language isn’t the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What’s unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.
THE MUSIC LANGUAGE
I think it’s likely that the language of the prairie dogs is a musical language. Dr. Slobodchikoff used special computer programs to analyze the prairie dog calls and found that the calls had different frequency ratios, which he thinks are patterns the prairie dogs created. He theorizes that frequency ratios may form patterns. To put it in simpler language, the calls are different pieces of music.
Sophie Yin at the University of California, Davis, found something similar in analyzing thousands of dog barks. Her analysis shows that dogs have different barks depending on the circumstances.24 When a dog spots a stranger its barks are rapid and urgent. When a dog is playing, its barks are slower and richer in harmony. No one knows what those harmonies mean, but the fact that they vary consistently depending on the dog’s situation tells me they likely have meaning to another dog. Dogs are also highly sensitive to tone of voice, which is the musical part of language.
Some scientists such as Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist at MIT who wrote the books The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, think music is just evolutionary baggage with no real purpose, but so many birds and animals create music that it doesn’t make sense to me that music could simply be so much evolutionary baggage.25 And if music is just evolutionary baggage, then why does the brain have different areas to analyze the five different components of music? Studies of patients with brain damage have shown that the five distinct brain-processing systems for music are melody, rhythm, meter, tonality, and timbre. My hypothesis is that music is the language of many animals.
Brain scan studies are beginning to offer some support for this idea. A study reported in Nature Neuroscience found that the same brain area that understands spoken language—Broca’s area—also understands music. That’s a big finding, because cognitive scientists have always believed that Broca’s area handles language and nothing else. So far researchers seem to be interpreting the new findings as possibly meaning that Broca’s area may be specific not to language but to processing the “implicit rules that organize complex information, such as music and language” instead.26
But I think the explanation could be that cognitive scientists were right in the first place. Maybe Broca’s area does handle language exclusively, and maybe that’s why it also handles music, because music is a language, too—or it could be. It’s possible that music, or something like it, once was the human language, and maybe it still is the language of birds and animals.
One thing that makes me believe this is high-functioning autistic people who’ve told me that when they were children echoing sentences they’d heard on TV, they didn’t know that the meaning was in the words. They thought all the meaning was in the tone. I can relate to that, because tone of voice is the only social cue I pick up easily. I also know of at least one parent who could communicate with her autistic daughter only through singing. If the mom sang, “Set the table now,” her daughter understood. If the mom said, “Set the table now,” her daughter didn’t understand. She got the meaning through the music. I wonder whether this is a case of autistic people falling back on earlier, animal forms of communication that are closer to music.
Probably all parents communicate with babies through music. Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto points out that lullabies are found in every culture, and parents speak to babies in singsong musical baby talk. She thinks music is a special communication channel between parent child.27
Last but not least, my mother has told me that the reason she knew I could be worked with was that she realized I was humming Bach along with her while she was playing it on the piano. I was two years old and not talking, and I was doing things like ripping the wallpaper off the wall and eating it. I hadn’t been diagnosed, but my mom knew something was drastically wrong, because I wasn’t developing like the little girl next door who was my same age. But I could hum Bach.
All of these things make me believe there’s a connection between music and language.
Scientifically speaking, I think we have some indirect support for this idea. DNA research on African tribes who speak click languages, languages in which the meaning comes from a change in tone, shows that tonal languages were probably the first language early humans spoke. Mandarin Chinese is also a tonal language. Tonal language isn’t considered to be the same thing as music, but researchers who are studying nonnative speakers’ ability to hear tone changes in Mandarin Chinese have found that music students outperform nonmusic students.28
We also have good evidence that music developed in animals long before humans evolved. That evidence comes from a study of animal music by a pianist named Patricia Gray of the National Music Arts program and five biological scientists that was published in the prestigious journal Science. The authors write, “The fact that whale and human music have so much in common even though our evolutionary paths have not intersected for 60 million years, suggests that music may predate humans—that rather than being the inventors of music, we are latecomers to the musical scene.”29
Animals are the originators of music and the true instructors. Humans probably learned music from animals, most likely from birds. More evidence that humans copied music from birds, rather than reinventing it for themselves: only 11 percent of all primate species sing songs.
Mozart was definitely influenced by birdsong. He owned a pet starling, and in his notebooks he recorded a passage from the Piano Concerto in G Major as he had written it, and as his pet starling had revised it. The bird had changed the sharps to flats. Mozart wrote, “Tha
t was beautiful” next to the starling’s version. When his starling died, Mozart sang hymns beside its grave and read a poem he had written for the bird. His next composition, “A Musical Joke,” has a starling style.30 If a musical genius like Mozart admired and learned from a bird, it seems extremely likely early humans learned from birds when they were inventing the first human music.
Animal music is another case where human researchers are reluctant to say animals can do the same thing humans can do—animals can create music. Even Patricia Gray uses the phrase “musical sounds,” not “animal music.” Still, everyone agrees that individual elements of animal music are the same as individual elements of human music. Humpback whale songs contain repeating refrains the same way human songs do, and some whale songs rhyme. Whales probably use rhymes for the same reason people do, which is that rhymes help you remember what comes next in your poem or song. At Cornell University, Linda Guinee and Katy Payne (Katy Payne is the person who discovered that elephants use infrasonic sound to communicate) have found that long, complicated whalesongs are much more likely to rhyme than the shorter, easier songs.
Birds compose songs that use the same variation in rhythms and pitch relationships as human musicians, and can also transpose their songs into a different musical key. Birds use accelerandos, crescendos, and diminuendos, as well as many of the same scales composers use all over the world.
Animals and humans also have similar musical tastes. Rats and starlings can distinguish between “good” chords that sound consonant and dissonant chords that sound “bad.” Luis Baptista, curator and chairman of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences until his death in 2002, has a tape of a white-breasted wood wren in Mexico singing the exact opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’s unlikely that bird ever heard a recording of Beethoven’s symphony before he sang it himself. The music that sounds beautiful to us also sounds beautiful to birds, and the bird composed the same theme.
Researchers also agree that animal song is highly complex, which makes it a good candidate for being a true animal language. Most animal communication researchers think animal calls are too simple to be real language. But nobody thinks animal song is simple. It could have the complexity to serve as a true animal language. To give just one example, it’s likely that birds invented the sonata. A sonata begins with an opening theme, then changes that theme over the body of the piece, and finally ends with a repetition of the opening theme. Ordinary song sparrows compose and sing sonatas. A music psychologist named Diana Deutsch at the University of California at San Diego divides the sounds humans make into three categories: music, speech, and paralinguistic utterances like laughter or groans. She thinks animal calls are like our paralinguistic utterances but says, “When we come to birdsong, with its elaborate hierarchical patterning, it seems that [human] music provides a better analogy.” In other words, animal music is music.31
Researchers who study animal songs say that animals use their songs to defend territory and attract mates, but I think animals probably use tone language to do more than that. We know music is deeply linked with emotions, because it lights up the emotional centers in the middle of the brain and even deep down in the cerebellum, which is the oldest part of the brain. A brain scan study by Carol Krumhansl of Cornell University found that music with a fast tempo played in a major key turned on the same physiological changes that happen when a person feels happy (such as faster breathing), while music in a minor key and a slow tempo produced the physiological changes that happen when you feel sad (slower pulse, higher blood pressure, drop in temperature).32
Maybe animals use tone to convey complex emotions to one another.
GIVING ANIMALS THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
The fact is, we don’t know very much about animal communication and animal language. If the history of animal research is anything to go on, we probably don’t even know what we think we know, since every time researchers think they’ve proved animals can’t do something along comes an animal who can. In animal communication and language, as in every other field of animal research, animals are going to turn out to be more capable than we know.
On the subject of animal communication, the debate comes down to two camps: people who think human language and animal communication are two separate and distinct things, and people who think human language and animal communication are on the same spectrum. Researchers who believe animal language is on a spectrum with human language believe that animal language might turn out to be simpler than human language, the way a two-year-old’s language is simpler than a grown-up’s, but it’s still language. The difference is quantitative, not qualitative.
I vote with the spectrum people. I also believe animal researchers should change their paradigm. We’ve seen so many animals do so many remarkable things that it’s time to start from the assumption that animals probably do have language rather than that they don’t. The questions you ask set limits on the answers you find, and I think we’ll learn more if we give animals the benefit of the doubt.
I’m going to end with a story about Alex. Dr. Pepperberg stays out of the language wars. She never says Alex has language, and she says she never will. I think that’s probably more because she wants to stay out of the crossfire than because she thinks the language Alex has learned isn’t “real.” I say this because currently she is trying to see if Alex can disprove Noam Chomsky’s latest proposal for what makes human language unique.
Noam Chomsky, Marc Hauser, and W. Tecumseh Fitch published an article in Science in 2002 arguing that humans are the only animals to have a language that is recursive. Loosely defined, recursive means that humans use rules to combine individual sounds and words into an infinite number of different sentences with different meanings.33
But Dr. Pepperberg points out that both dolphins and parrots can understand recursive sentences. Dolphins can handle sentences like “Touch the surfboard that is gray and to the left” versus “Swim over the Frisbee that is black and to your right.” Apparently Noam Chomsky and his colleagues think that doesn’t count, because the dolphins aren’t creating these sentences; they’re just understanding them. How any scientist can assume he knows for a fact that a dolphin doesn’t produce recursive sentences in real life is a mystery to me.
Not very long ago, Dr. Pepperberg began trying to teach Alex and another gray parrot, Griffin, to sound out phonemes, which are the sounds that letters and letter combinations represent. English has forty phonemes altogether. She and her colleagues wanted to see if the birds understood that words are made out of letters that could be recombined to make other words, so they started training the birds with magnetic refrigerator letters.
One day their corporate sponsors were visiting Dr. Pepperberg’s lab, and she and her staff wanted to show off what Alex and Griffin could do. So they put a bunch of colored plastic refrigerator letters on a tray and started asking Alex questions.
“Alex, what sound is blue?”
Alex made the sound “Sssss.” That was right; the blue letter was “S.”
Dr. Pepperberg said, “Good birdie,” and Alex said, “Want a nut,” because he was supposed to get a nut whenever he gave the right answer.
But Dr. Pepperberg didn’t want him sitting there eating a nut during the limited time she had with their sponsors, so she told Alex to wait, and then asked, “What sound is green?”
The green example was the letter combination of “SH” and Alex said, “Ssshh.” He was right again.
Dr. Pepperberg said, “Good parrot,” and Alex said, “Want a nut.”
But Dr. Pepperberg said, “Alex, wait. What sound is orange?”
Alex got that one right, too, and he still didn’t get his nut. They just kept going on and on, making him sound out letters for his audience. Alex was obviously getting more frustrated by the minute.
Finally Alex lost his patience.
Here’s the way Dr. Pepperberg describes it: Alex “gets very slitty-eyed and he looks
at me and states, ‘Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh.’”
Alex had spelled “nut.” Dr. Pepperberg and her team were spending hours and hours training him on plastic refrigerator letters to see if Alex could eventually be taught that words are made out of sounds, and he already knew how to spell. He was miles ahead of them.
Dr. Pepperberg says, “These kinds of things don’t happen in the lab on a daily basis, but when they do, they make you realize there’s a lot more going on inside these little walnut-sized brains than you might at first imagine.” I would like to add that there is a lot more going on than humans perceive. Dr. Pepperberg and her team are probably the world’s foremost authorities on parrot cognitive abilities, they’ve been working with Alex for twenty years, and yet they had no idea Alex had learned to spell.34
It’s time to start thinking about animals as capable and communicative beings. It’s also time to stop making assumptions. Animal researchers take a lot for granted: “animals don’t have language,” “animals don’t have psychological self-awareness”—you find blanket assertions like this sprinkled throughout the research literature. But the truth is, we don’t know what animals can’t do any better than we know what they can do. It’s hard to prove a negative, and proving negatives shouldn’t be the focus.
If we’re interested in animals, then we need to study animals for their own sake, and on their own terms, to the extent that it’s possible. What are they doing? What are they feeling? What are they thinking? What are they saying?
Who are they?
And: what do we need to do to treat animals fairly, responsibly, and with kindness?
Those are the real questions.
7. Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
It’s getting to be obvious even to skeptics that animals are smarter than we think.
Animals in Translation Page 33