"preposterous to teach an animal English"

Preposterous, eh? Guess I'll learn Beluga instead….

Scientists study the songs of beluga white whales, such as
this one at the Hakkeijima Sea Paradise Aquarium in
Yokohama, Japan, to see if they can decipher whale language.
(KOICHI KAMOSHIDA / GETTY IMAGE/ July 19, 2005)

Beastly Banter
By William Weir , Hartford Courant
25 February 2008

From the days of Melampus, the soothsayer of Greek mythology who conspired with termites and vultures, right up to Mr. Ed, the idea of talking animals is one that won't go away.

A quick look around shows that time has hardly changed things. For years, researchers have studied the songs of birds and whales, hoping to suss out a secret language. The cover story of the March issue of National Geographic, 'Inside Animal Minds,' tells of a border collie with a 340-word vocabulary and a bonobo who understands more than 1,000 words. Last month, researchers reported that they had developed a computer program that successfully deciphers dog barks.

And today marks the release of what might be the first biography of a laboratory research animal, 'The Chimp Who Would Be Human' (Bantam, $23).

Written by Elizabeth Hess, it tells the story of the chimpanzee who became the center of a bitter debate in the 1970s over whether animals possess what could be called language. Publisher's Weekly states that the book 'captures Nim's legendary charm, mischievous sense of humor, and keen understanding of human beings.'

Named for linguist Noam Chomsky (dismissive of the possibility of animal language), Nim could form up to 125 signs in American Sign Language. By the end of 'Project Nim,' the chimp had his champions, but the overall conclusion was that he didn't truly comprehend the signs he was making. Nim retired to a ranch in Texas and died in 2000.

'Project Nim was declared a failure because Nim was declared a mimic,' Hess says, adding that many interpreted the ruling as implying that all chimps are mere mimics. 'It put a big damper on the whole field for about five years.'

Hess, who also wrote 'Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter,' says she was surprised by how contentious the feud over animal language was.

'I didn't know about the ape-language political scene in academia,' she says. It's an issue that's 'still hotly debated, much to my amazement.'

Nim belongs to a long tradition of 'talking' animal celebrities. Washoe, a chimp whose training began in the late 1960s, was possibly the first non-human to learn sign language - or any human language. And Koko the gorilla is said to have learned more than 1,000 signs.

In the early 20th century, there was Clever Hans, a horse that caused a sensation for his supposed ability to do math. An investigation found that the trainer was unwittingly giving the horse cues with his body language. More recently, we had Alex, an African gray parrot trained at Brandeis University by scientist and professor Irene Pepperberg. His death last year made headlines around the world.

Alex shot to talking-animal stardom in the 1990s, when he demonstrated not just an ability to sound out certain words, like other parrots, but an understanding of those words. Pepperberg said he was close to understanding the concept of zero, one of the trickier abstract concepts. As amazing a display as it was, many still refused to acknowledge Alex's feat as achieving language.

Understanding Barks When it comes to the issue of animal communication, researchers tend to fall on one of two sides. Some believe the animals are either using an actual language (and in some cases speech), albeit one much less sophisticated than humans. Others maintain that even the most complex animal communication systems fall short of the criteria for language. For one thing, they say, there's no syntax, a basic requirement of language. Without combining words and then being able to switch combinations to change meaning, goes the argument, what animals use is more like a code than a language.

'There's a lot of skeptics,' Hess says. 'It's a very fundamental and threatening issue, and there are those who don't want to believe that animals around them are intelligent.'

Besides upending long-held beliefs about humans' and animals' place in the world, she says, acknowledging intelligence and language capacity in animals would call into question the practice of using them for research.

In a new Bud Light commercial, which claims that the beer bestows the power to talk to animals, a dog owner asks his pet how he's doing. The response: 'Sausages! Sausages! Sausages! Sausages ... .'

But research suggests the canine brain might be a little more complex.

The bark-decoding computer program was developed by Csaba Molnar, an ethologist at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary. More than 6,000 barks of 14 Hungarian sheepdogs were placed in six categories: 'stranger,' 'fight,' 'alone,' 'play,' 'walk' and 'ball.' The computer program proved to be correct about half the time in identifying the barks - a good bit better than human results.

Other recent studies on animal communication include one published in Current Biology on whether dolphins address each other 'by name' with signature whistles. 'Although it may be tempting to jump to the most cognitively remarkable nd anthropomorphic interpretations," researchers state in their paper that the jury is still out. Psychologists at Harvard have been studying apes and monkeys to unlock the secrets of how human language has evolved. Researchers at the University of Alabama published a study in December that gerbils can discern between "you" and "me" (though they don't believe they know what they mean).

"I think the fascination is endless because we know animals are communicating with each other, and it's like breaking the code," Hess says. "What amazes me is that, after all this time, how little we know."

For the most part, Hess says research today is concentrating less on how to communicate with animals than how animals communicate with each other.

"Now, it seems a little bit preposterous to teach an animal English," she says. "Humanizing animals doesn't really make any sense. It doesn't make sense for us, and it doesn't make sense for the animals."

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