Animals in Translation (42 page)

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, “That 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.
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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 Cali
fornia 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.
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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).
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Maybe animals use tone to convey complex emotions to one another.

G
IVING
A
NIMALS THE
B
ENEFIT OF THE
D
OUBT

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 lan
guage 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.

I
t's getting to be obvious even to skeptics that animals are smarter than we think.

The question is, how much smarter?

My answer is that there are some animals who, like some people, have a form of genius. These animals have talents that are so extraordinary they're way past anything any normal human being could do even with a lot of hard work and practice.

Who are these animals?

Birds, for one. The more I learn about birds, the more I'm beginning to think we have no idea what the limits to some bird species' intelligence are. Bird migration is probably the most extraordinary talent we know about right now. Birds have brains no bigger than a walnut, but they can learn and remember migratory routes thousands of miles in distance. The Arctic tern has the longest migratory route we know about: 18,000 miles, round-trip. Some of these birds travel from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again every year.

E
XTREME
M
EMORY

What makes this a genius-level ability instead of just some miraculous ability that's built into the species, like having wings and being able to fly, is the fact that birds have to
learn
these routes. They aren't born knowing their species' migratory route; it isn't hardwired. Moreover, they learn the routes with almost no effort at all.
Many migratory birds have genius-level learning abilities when it comes to migration.

There's a good movie about these birds called
Fly Away Home,
based on the story of Bill Lishman, the man who, along with his partner, Joseph Duff, taught a bunch of Canada geese to follow him in his ultralight airplane. They created the project because they wanted to try to save the whooping cranes, which are on the verge of extinction. Operation Migration, the charity Bill Lishman founded, says there are only 188 whooping cranes left in the world. They're all in one big flock, which makes them even more vulnerable to extinction.

Up until Bill Lishman came along people were trying to save the species by raising baby whooping cranes in captivity. But it wasn't working because when the babies were brought up without any migrating adults to teach them the routes, there was no way to reintroduce them to the wild. They didn't know how to migrate, so when winter came they would just stay put and die in the cold.

Bill Lishman had the idea of teaching the whooping cranes to migrate by leading them along a migration path in his ultralight plane, a small one-person airplane that can fly as slowly as 28 to 58 miles per hour. He started out working with Canada geese, because geese aren't in danger of going extinct. Any golfer on the East Coast can tell you there's no goose shortage. As a matter of fact the goose poop problem has gotten so out of hand that some Border collies are getting a brand-new job working goose patrol at golf courses. That's good, because Border collies need a job. They get antsy living a life of leisure.

Pretty quickly Mr. Lishman managed to show that you could teach geese to follow a human in an ultralight airplane,
and
you could teach them a four-hundred-mile one-way migration route flying it just once. No human being could memorize a four-hundred-mile route across unmarked open terrain after traveling it just one time. Bird migration is an extreme talent.

After he knew he could do it with geese, he switched to sandhill cranes, which are related to whooping cranes but aren't endangered. In 1997 he led seven sandhill cranes from southern Ontario down to
Virginia, a four-hundred-mile trip one way. The cranes spent the winter in Virginia and then, one day at the end of March, they went out for their daily foraging and didn't come back. Two days later Mr. Lishman got a call from a school principal up in Ontario who said he had six big birds in his schoolyard entertaining the students! Six of the seven birds had made it the whole four hundred miles back to Canada, after having flown the route only once in their lives, and in the opposite direction. They ended up thirty miles away from where they'd been fledged.

Lots of animals have extreme memory and learning abilities in one realm or another. Gray squirrels bury hundreds of nuts every winter, one nut in each burial spot, and they remember them all. They remember where they hid each nut, what kind of nut it was, and even when they hid it. They're not just marking the spots some way, or finding the nuts by smell, which is what a lot of people probably assume. I read a gardening column the other day where a woman wrote in asking whether there was any way to keep squirrels from digging up her garden. The columnist answered that squirrels forget where they've buried their nuts, so they dig everything up. That is
not
true. Squirrels remember exactly where they buried hundreds and hundreds of nuts. Dr. Pierre Lavenex at the University of California, Berkeley, a researcher who studies memory in gray squirrels, says, “They use information from the environment, such as the relative position of trees and buildings, and they triangulate, relying on the angles and distances between these distant landmarks and their caches.”
¹

No human can do that. A normal human can't even remember where he put the car keys half the time, let alone where he buried five hundred individual nuts. How long would a person last if he had to eat buried nuts for food? He wouldn't get through the winter, that's for sure. “People can do this [i.e. triangulate landmarks to find the precise spot where they've buried something] for a few sites,” Dr. Lavenex says, “maybe six or seven, but not for nearly as many as squirrels do.”

Most animals have “superhuman” skills like this:
animals have animal genius.
Birds are navigation geniuses, dogs are smell geniuses, eagles are visual geniuses—it can be anything.

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XTREME
P
ERCEPTION AND
A
NIMAL
I
NTELLIGENCE

Many animals also have extreme perception. Forensic dogs are three times as good as any X-ray machine at sniffing out contraband, drugs, or explosives, and their overall success rate on tests is 90 percent.

The fact that a dog can smell things a person can't doesn't make him a genius; it just makes him a dog. Humans can see things dogs can't, but that doesn't make us smarter.

But when you look at the jobs some dogs have invented for themselves using their advanced perceptual abilities, you're moving into the realm of true cognition, which is solving a problem under novel conditions. The seizure alert dogs are an example of an animal using advanced perceptual abilities to solve a problem no dog was born knowing how to solve. Seizure alert dogs are dogs who, their owners say, can
predict
a seizure before it starts. There's still controversy over whether you can train a dog to predict seizures, and so far people haven't had a lot of luck trying. But there are a number of dogs who have figured it out on their own. These dogs were trained as seizure-response dogs, meaning they can help a person once a seizure has begun. The dog might be trained to lie on top of the person so he doesn't hurt himself, or bring the person his medicine or the telephone. Those are all standard helpful behaviors any dog can be trained to perform.

But some of these dogs have gone from responding to seizures to perceiving signs of a seizure ahead of time. No one knows how they do this, because the signs are invisible to people. No human being can look at someone who's about to have a seizure and see (or hear, smell, or feel) what's coming. Yet one study found that 10 percent of owners said their seizure response dogs had turned into seizure alert dogs.

The
New York Times
published a terrific article about a woman named Connie Standley, in Florida, who has two huge Bouvier des Flandres dogs who predict her seizures about thirty minutes ahead of time.
²
When they sense Ms. Standley is heading into a seizure they'll do things like pull on her clothes, bark at her, or drag on her
hand to get her to someplace safe so she won't get hurt when the seizure begins. Ms. Standley says they predict about 80 percent of her seizures. Ms. Standley's dogs apparently were trained as seizure alert dogs before they came to her, but there aren't many dogs in that category. Most of the seizure alert dogs were trained to respond to seizures, not predict seizures.

The seizure alert dogs remind me of Clever Hans. Hans was the world-famous German horse in the early 1900s whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, thought he could count. Herr von Osten could ask the horse questions like, “What's seven and five?” and Hans would tap out the number 12 with his hoof. Hans could even tap out answers to questions like, “If the eighth day of the month comes on Tuesday, what is the date for the following Friday?” He could answer mathematical questions posed to him by complete strangers, too.

Eventually a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst managed to show that Hans wasn't really counting. Instead, Hans was observing subtle, unconscious cues the humans had no idea they were giving off. He'd start tapping his foot when he could see it was time to start tapping; then he'd stop tapping his foot when he saw it was time to stop tapping. His questioners were making tiny, unconscious movements only Hans could see. The movements were so tiny the humans making them couldn't even
feel
them.

Dr. Pfungst couldn't see the movements, either, and he was looking for them. He finally solved the case by putting Hans's questioners out of view and having them ask Hans questions they didn't know the answers to themselves. It turned out Hans could answer questions only when the person asking the question was in plain view and already knew the answer. If either condition was missing, his performance fell apart.

Psychologists often use the Clever Hans story to show that humans who believe animals are intelligent are deluding themselves. But that's not the obvious conclusion as far as I'm concerned. No one has ever been able to
train
a horse to do what Hans did. Hans trained himself. Is the ability to read a member of a different species as well as Hans was reading human beings really a sign that he was just a “dumb animal” who'd been classically conditioned to stamp his hoof? I think there's more to it than that.

What makes Hans similar to the seizure alert dogs is that both Hans and the dogs acquired their skills without human help. As I mentioned, to my knowledge, so far no one's figured out how to take a “raw” dog and teach it how to predict seizures. About the best a trainer can do is reward the dogs for helping when a person is having a seizure and then leave it up to the dog to start identifying signs that predict the onset of a seizure on his own. That approach hasn't been hugely successful, but some dogs do it. I think those dogs are showing superior intelligence the same way a human who can do something few other people can do shows superior intelligence.

What makes the actions of the seizure alert dogs, and probably of Hans, too, a sign of high intelligence—or high talent—is the fact that they didn't have to do what they did. It's one thing for a dog to start recognizing the signs that a seizure is coming; you might chalk that up to unique aspects of canine hearing, smell, or vision, like the fact that a dog can hear a dog whistle while a human can't. But it's another thing for a dog to start to recognize the signs of an impending seizure and
then decide to do something about it.
That's what intelligence is in humans; intelligence is people using their built-in perceptual and cognitive skills to achieve useful and sometimes remarkable goals.

I
NVISIBLE TO THE
N
AKED
E
YE

By now you're probably thinking, if animals are so smart, why hasn't anyone noticed?

First of all, we have no idea what most animals are doing in the wild. Even when people like Jane Goodall have been able to spend years doing close observation of a group of animals in their native habitat, we still don't learn what the
animals
think they're doing, or what they're communicating to one another about what they're doing. That's why it's always a surprise when a crow like Betty spontaneously bends a wire to make a food hook, or a gray parrot like Alex suddenly spells the word “nut.” Just the other day I met a lady at a conference who told me about another super-smart bird living in a Florida hotel. This bird is a macaw who invented a new word—
crackey
—to signify either cookie or cracker. Those are the two foods his owner gives him as treats, so apparently the macaw decided that
cookie-cracker
is a food category unto itself, requiring its own word, which he created by putting “cookie” and “cracker” together. He's right about cookies and crackers; they
are
a separate category. Cookies and crackers are both treats, not “real” food. I'm guessing that's what the bird means when he asks for a crackey; he's probably asking for junk food.

Another gray parrot, N'Kisi, owned by Aimee Morgana in New York City, has a vocabulary of over five hundred English words. She uses the present, past, and future tenses and once used the word “flied” to mean “flew.” She called the aromatherapy oils Aimee uses “pretty smell medicine.”

The point is, we don't know what animals can and can't do. The fact that we're constantly being dumbfounded by brand-new abilities no one had a clue animals possessed ought to be a lesson to us about how much we don't know.

I
F
A
NIMALS
A
RE
S
O
S
MART
, W
HY
A
REN'T
T
HEY IN
C
HARGE
?

I think the reason researchers don't take this lesson more to heart is that most people just naturally assume, without stopping to think about it, that if animals were as smart as humans or smarter, they'd have more to show for it. Where are all the animal inventions? That's the big question.