Animals in Translation (41 page)

For the twenty-five years up to 1999 I'd been putting equipment into plants. Some of the plants used it right, but others just tore it up and ruined it. Now my equipment is perfectly maintained and there's nothing broken on it anywhere. For the first twenty-five years of my career I was a hardware engineer; now finally I'm installing the management software. Training those auditors: that's the software installation for the hardware I put into half the plants in North America.

 

My simple five-point checklist works beautifully. But even though it works, and even though I can show that animals being audited by 100-point checklists are being handled poorly, I have to fight constantly to keep it in place.

D
O
A
NIMALS
T
ALK TO
E
ACH
O
THER THE
W
AY
P
EOPLE
D
O
?

Those are fighting words in the fields of animal and linguistic research. A lot of people are emotionally invested in the idea that language is the one thing that makes human beings unique. Language is sacrosanct. It's the last boundary standing between man and beast.

Now even this final boundary is being challenged. Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University has done some of the most amazing studies in animal communication and cognition.
²²
Using sonograms to analyze the distress calls of Gunnison's prairie dog, one of five species of prairie dogs found in the U.S. and Mexico, he has found that prairie dog colonies have a communication system that includes nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They can tell one another what kind of predator is approaching—man, hawk, coyote, dog (noun)—and they can tell each other how fast it's moving (verb). They can say whether a human is carrying a gun or not.

They can also identify individual coyotes and tell one another which one is coming. They can tell the other prairie dogs that the approaching coyote is the one who likes to walk straight through the colony and then suddenly lunge at a prairie dog who's gotten too far away from the entrance to his burrow, or the one who likes to lie patiently by the side of a hole for an hour and wait for his dinner to appear. If the prairie dogs are signaling the approach of a person, they can tell one another something about what color clothing the person is wearing, as well as something about his size and shape (adjectives). They also have a lot of other calls that have not been deciphered.

Dr. Slobodchikoff was able to interpret the calls by videotaping everything, analyzing the sound spectrum, and then watching the video to see what the prairie dog making a distress call was reacting to when he made it. He also watched to see how the other prairie dogs responded. That was an important clue, because he found that the prairie dogs reacted differently to different warnings. If the warning was about a hawk making a dive, all the prairie dogs raced to their burrows and vanished down into holes. But if the hawk was circling overhead, the prairie dogs stopped foraging, stood up in an alert posture, and waited to see what happened next. If the call warned about a human, the prairie dogs all ran for their burrows no matter how fast the human was coming.

Dr. Slobodchikoff also found evidence that prairie dogs aren't born knowing the calls, the way a baby is born knowing how to cry. They have to learn them. He bases this on the fact that the different prairie dog colonies around Flagstaff all have different dialects. Since
genetically these animals are almost identical, Dr. Slobodchikoff argues that genetic differences can't explain the differences in the calls. That means the calls have been created by the individual colonies and passed on from one generation to the next.

Is this “real” language? A philosopher of language might say no, but the case against animal language is getting weaker. Different linguists have somewhat different definitions of language, but everyone agrees that language has to have
meaning, productivity
(you can use the same words to make an infinite number of new communications), and
displacement
(you can use language to talk about things that aren't present).

Prairie dogs use their language to refer to real dangers in the real world, so it definitely has meaning.

Their language probably has productivity, too, since they can apply the same adjectives to different animals. Dr. Slobodchikoff has also done some interesting experiments to see what calls prairie dogs would make to an object they'd never seen before.

He built three plywood silhouettes, a skunk, a coyote, and a black oval, and dragged them through the prairie dog colony on a pulley. The prairie dogs gave alarm calls to all three objects, and each prairie dog used the same call for the same plywood object. These calls weren't invented on the spot, either. At least one of the calls—for the plywood coyote—was a variant of an old call Dr. Slobodchikoff had already recorded them using. That's more evidence the prairie dogs were combining their old “words” to describe something new.

Another interesting finding: all three plywood objects were new to the prairie dogs, but the prairie dogs used different calls to identify each one. Dr. Slobodchikoff says that means it's unlikely the prairie dogs were simply using a rote call meaning “something new is coming.” He also says that the prairie dogs seem to be using
transformational rules
to create their calls. In human language, a transformational rule allows you to turn words into sentences that make sense. The person listening to you uses the same rules to decode what you're saying. The prairie dogs seem to have a transformational rule based on speed. Depending on how fast a predator is moving, they speed up their calls or slow them down.

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.

W
HY
P
RAIRIE
D
OGS
?

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.”
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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.

T
HE
M
USIC
L
ANGUAGE

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.
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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.”
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