By Arik Kershenbaum at Literary Review: If a cow said, ‘Don’t eat me’, we wouldn’t. We seem to regard the capacity for language (by which we mean our kind of language) as evidence of moral significance. But do animals talk? Many traditions assume they do, and understanding animal talk has sometimes been thought to indicate great human wisdom. The proverbially wise Solomon understood the language of the birds, and St Francis preached to them. Most of us have asked what a crow’s squawk or a dog’s whine means.Perhaps we ask because we feel that animals can tell us something we don’t know about the sort of place this world is.
For much of the last four hundred years, enquiries of this kind have been disreputable. Descartes declared that animals were automatons and Enlightenment thinkers duly reconceived the cosmos and everything in it, apart from humans, as a machine. We humans hung on to our souls for a while, but now we are machines too. The study of animal behavior has long been merely the study of how animals react to stimuli. Ask what they were thinking and the journals would reject your article.
But things are changing, as Arik Kershenbaum’s splendid book shows. A University of Cambridge zoologist specialising in the science of animal communication, he has studied five – wolves, dolphins, parrots, hyraxes and chimpanzees – of the seven species considered in this book in the wild (the other two are gibbons and humans). It might seem obvious that animal communication should be studied in the wild, but this idea is quite recent and radical. It requires a rejection of Descartes’s canonical premise. If a rat is an automaton, it can be studied satisfactorily in a laboratory maze.
Kershenbaum begins with another observation that sounds trite: to understand animal communication we have to understand the animal societies in which the communication occurs. We have to ask why animals whistle, grunt and howl. Such activities are costly. Natural selection demands a strenuous justification for the outlay. On this issue, there are few great surprises in his survey. Wolves howl to mark their territory and to keep in touch over long distances; high-ranking male hyraxes have complex songs because complexity is a good marker of fitness and is attractive to females; gibbon couples sing duets to one another when they wake to keep the relationship strong and to declare to listening would-be adulterers that there is no chance of an extramarital affair; chimpanzees use many sounds from their wide repertoire for political intrigue, for threatening, for coaxing and cajoling, and for coordinating monkey hunts; many animal utterances are undifferentiated bursts of emotion, rather like human exclamations such as ‘Oh my god’ or ‘What on earth?’
More here.
