Book Review: How Much Can Animals Really Communicate?

Yves here. It seems useful, when suitable opportunities present themselves, to range outside what these days is particularly stressful news-related fare for other informative topics. Animal communication, interests most pet owners as well as animal-lovers and animal professionals (such as farmers and zoo employees). But this article is separately instructive as an exercise in how to treat a natively difficult topic with rigor.

The author of the book profiled here sees animal communication as limited and as I infer, largely  contained to alerts about dangers and identifying members of  the immediate pack/tribe, and therefore by implication also fairly simple. Not having read it, I wonder how he explains crows being able to describe the faces of people they regard as threats to other crows, over time frames and participating crow numbers that would seem to make it impossible for all or even most of the crows to have seen the original “bad”‘ human (as in the number of scolding crows and time distance from the original human offending behavior can’t be readily explained by a crow simply issuing a call “That guy is nasty!”). So how do they convey what “evil person” looks like to crows that have not seen him?

You can find a detailed discussion of the crow study at issue here.

Having said that, considering how to convey information outside our structure of language is useful.

By Erica Goode, a science journalist, is a former reporter and editor at The New York Times and former managing editor of Inside Climate News. Originally published at Undark

Over the last decades, researchers who study animal behavior have succeeded in largely blurring the line between Homo sapiens and other animals. Like their human counterparts, animals feel emotions, they solve problems, they communicate and form complicated relationships, investigators have found.

Any number of books — think of Ed Yong’s “An Immense World” or Marc Bekoff’s “The Emotional Lives of Animals” — have been dedicated to exploring these relatively recently recognized abilities.

Yet few books on the ways animals communicate have been written through the eyes of a scientist as cautious and as thoughtful as zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, the author of “Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication.”

Kershenbaum, a lecturer and fellow at the University of Cambridge, is distrustful of simplistic explanations, wary of assumptions, devoted to caveats — few statements come without qualification. In Socratic fashion, he asks a lot of questions, the answers to which, in many cases, neither he nor anyone else can yet provide.

That did not deter him from writing the book and it should not deter other people from reading it. But those who pick up “Why Animals Talk” expecting to find proof of animal telepathy or hoping for a dictionary of elephant-speak or a word-for-word translation of humpback whale songs, will be disappointed. (On Amazon, one disgruntled reviewer summarized the book: “Animals don’t really talk – The End.”)

If there is a message that Kershenbaum wants to get across, it’s that, as much as we’d like to be able to hold conversations with our pets or chat with chimpanzees at the zoo, it makes no sense to expect animals to communicate in the same way that humans do, “with the same equipment as we have, the same ears and eyes and brains.”

The idea of words, as we conceive them, has no meaning in the animal world; language is a human concept. Animal communication, Kershenbaum writes, is intimately bound up with evolutionary strategies for survival: Species develop forms of communication that allow them the best chance of successfully negotiating the environment and social structures they inhabit, whether it’s the underwater world of the dolphin or the highly social forest havens of the wolf.

Scientists, Kershenbaum tells us, are learning a great deal by analyzing animal sounds — the howls of wolves, the whistles of dolphins, the songs of the hyrax, a small, furry mammal related to the elephant and the manatee — and examining them for evidence of syntax and grammar, the building blocks of language. But the “why” in the title of the book is important, underscoring his view that knowing exactly what animals are “saying” is less important than trying to understand why they are communicating at all.

“Even if we discover that we will never talk to animals in the same way as we can talk to other humans, never hold a true conversation with a dolphin, still just by probing those possibilities we will find out why they live their lives the way they do,” he writes.

“Why Animals Talk” is organized around discussions of six different animals (seven if you count humans) extensively studied by researchers, with a chapter set aside for each. Kershenbaum has himself conducted research on some of these, including wolves, dolphins, gibbons, and parrots — but he also weaves in studies by other researchers: The parrot chapter, for example, centers largely on the work of Irene Pepperberg, who famously taught an African gray parrot named Alex to speak.

To understand animals, Kershenbaum tells us in the chapter on wolves, “is to understand the stories of animals as individuals, observed in the wild, but recognized as separate from their brothers and sisters, and from strangers of the same species — who might look the same to us, but can be perceived as mortal enemies by the animals themselves.”

He returns repeatedly throughout the book to these questions: What is language? How different from other animals are we really?

The howl of the wolf is meant for long-range communication, very different from the variety of short-range sounds — growls, whimpers, yelps, and whines that are softer and contain more complex information. Howls can be heard 6 miles (or more) away and are marked by changes in pitch and tempo. Scientists are mostly in agreement, Kershenbaum notes, about three different functions of howls: They can be used to mark out territory, to keep in touch with other wolves in the pack, or just for the joy of howling.

But “do these three roles of howling mean that wolf howls have three different meanings?” he asks. Kershenbaum doesn’t think so.

Some vocalizations — a screech of fear, for example, or a soothing cooing sound — seem to convey emotions across species. But, he writes, “We understand ‘meaning’ as having a clear definition at all only because we have language.”

“If you don’t have a language — you don’t even have a concept of what a language might be — then you probably don’t have a clear concept of unique meaning,” he adds.

Instead, howls seem to convey ideas “without needing distinct, discrete meanings, in the sense that our language-infused brains expect.”

“Why Animals Talk” is full of interesting facts about animal communication: Dolphins identify themselves with signature whistles. The most dominant male hyrax is the one with the most complicated song. Greater honeyguides — small birds in sub-Saharan Africa — engage in a cooperative exchange of information with people hunting for honey, trading calls and whistles back and forth: The birds guide the humans to honey, and the humans break open the hive, giving the birds access to the beeswax and larvae.

The songs of the lar gibbon, one of the most sophisticated communicators of the animal world, continue for 300 or 400 notes, with the potential to be combined into a staggeringly large number of songs.

In every case, as Kershenbaum illustrates, from the basic “I am here” of a songbird to the far more sophisticated utterances of a gibbon or a chimpanzee, the way information is communicated is a product of the animal’s need to survive in specific circumstances, and is developed as far as it needs to be, no more and no less.

No book on animal communication would be complete without writing about dogs, and this one is no exception. Kershenbaum’s own dog, Darwin, makes guest appearances throughout the book. (Before it was finished, however, Darwin died at 16, and the book is dedicated to him.)

Dogs play an important role in any story of animal communication because so much information passes back and forth between dog and owner, in a relationship forged over tens of thousands of years, to the benefit of both. But readers will find no endorsement of their canine companions having telepathic abilities or other common notions that many people have about their dogs — and about animals more generally.

“Why Animals Talk” can be a frustrating book. Kershenbaum often writes in a circular manner — repeating what he has written earlier, in slightly different words, often with some element added — and is overly reliant on posing questions to convey ideas. One would like to think that a good editor could have straightened out these knots.

Yet there is no question that Kershenbaum’s book is also stimulating and that it challenges readers to think hard about what we share with the other animals on our planet, and what separates us from them.

Because there is, in fact, a line, as Kershenbaum eventually concludes. “Yes, there is a lot in common,” he writes. “Animals have some syntax and even some sounds that behave a little like words, and they sometimes communicate complex ideas, although more often simple ones. But animals don’t combine all these abilities with explosive effect as we do.”

What’s more, he adds: “We’ve moved so far away from what animals do, and moved away so quickly, that direct comparisons between ourselves and other species seem almost childish. It should be clear that ‘Do animals have language?’ was never a good question.”