Non-Human Animal Talk

It is clear that some animals have the potential to use language in the sense that we understand it. This is not realised in the wild because it would not give a selective advantage. African grey parrots are the obvious example. One famous African grey, Alex, lived in Professor Irene Pepperberg’s lab. Every night, when she left for home, he said to her, ‘You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow.’ That’s not particularly impressive: the parrot could simply have been copying her. But Alex could do much more than that. He knew that words related to concepts, which is probably a defining element of any true language. If presented with a tray of objects of different shapes and colours and made of various materials, he would accurately answer questions such as ‘How many triangles?’ or ‘How many red squares?’ or ‘How many wood?’ And he learned not just the associations of words, but their meanings too. He looked into a mirror and asked, ‘What colour?’ That was how he learned the word ‘grey’. This has been described as the only known example of a non-human asking a direct question. Alex, says Kershenbaum, had ‘the core of what is necessary for language’ – and probably ‘that’s an understatement’.

‘Do animals have language?’ is a bad question. They talk, concludes Kershenbaum, but not in the way we do. We are pathologically linguistic. We chop the world up into propositions and, if we’re not careful, examine those rather than the world itself. The behaviourist Temple Grandin speculates that non-human animals might rely on mental images rather than something tantamount to language to conceptualise ideas (as people like her, with autism spectrum disorder, do). We can’t know, but Kershenbaum is sympathetic to the notion. 

Kershenbaum no doubt sees Why Animals Talk as a book about biology. I prefer to see it as a humble, genial, scholarly, impeccably clear meditation on our own Umwelt. He challenges us to consider that there are ways of being in the world other than ours. Our old instinct is right: if we learn how to listen properly, animals really can tell us something significant about the world that we wouldn’t know without them.

- Review of the book Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication by Arik Kershenbaum