Article: WILL WE TALK WITH THE BIRDS? By Patrice van Eersel

ARCHIVE PATRICE VAN EERSEL

ARCHIVE PATRICE VAN EERSEL
Index of previously published articles

French Version
WILL WE TALK WITH THE BIRDS?
By Patrice van Eersel
First published in ACTUEL N°93-98, 1987

1960s – Scientists try to teach animals English.
1970s – They realize their imperialism: animals also exchange signs, but not in English.
1980s – Inter-species communication strikes up a different tune.

“Tell me, Alex, what’s the same about these two objects?
— I want grain!
— What’s the same?
— I want grain!
— Come on, answer, Alex.
— I’m going to leave.
— What’s the same?
— Shape.
— Bravo, Alex! And here, what’s different?
— Color.
— Good!
— I want grain.
— Sure, but wait, what color is this?
— Yellow.
— What a good birdy!
— Will you tickle me?
— With pleasure, Alex.”

And Irene Pepperberg begins scratching Alex the parrot’s head, his feathers fluffing up in delight.
This conversation took place in the ethology department of Northwestern University, where Alex is the star. After nine years of training, this parrot has learned to name dozens of objects, to use the verb “I want,” and to apply it even to objects he sees for the first time. Alex the parrot seems endowed with intelligent consciousness—and he expresses it in English! He truly communicates with humans, who are left astonished. Is that possible?
The path toward animal communication in science has been long. In the 1950s and 60s, there was intense enthusiasm—too much, in fact, and too anthropocentric. John Lilly and his early dolphins, Allen and Beatrix Gardner and their chimpanzees... The most famous ape in America was Washoe (see Actuel no. 19). The Gardners raised her like their own child and taught her 170 words of American Sign Language (ASL). Other striking experiments took place at the same time—Lana, the Atlanta chimp and her computer; or Sarah in Pennsylvania, who arranged color-coded symbols grammatically—all of it seemed to prove that language might not be an exclusively human trait. And that opened up staggering possibilities.
Then came Herbert Terrace. At first a strong proponent of interspecies communication, this Columbia University psychologist decided to film his young chimp, Nim Chimpsky (named after linguist Noam Chomsky, who maintains that language, even gestural, is uniquely human), 24 hours a day. The result was a disaster. Terrace discovered that scientists had failed to include themselves in their observational framework. They hadn’t realized how much their unconscious facial expressions and gestures influenced their animal “partners.” According to Terrace, the poor animals had only been responding to subliminal cues.
Was Terrace right? In any case, frame-by-frame analysis of Nim’s behavior showed that he was merely mimicking what his trainers "dictated"—and only really cared about food. Terrace’s report caused a major stir in the scientific community. By the late 1970s, most funding was cut.
Yet ten years later, a new generation of interspecies communicators had quietly re-opened the path to animal consciousness. For the first time, a parrot seemed to speak real English; a chimpanzee understood dozens of words; elephant seals proved able to grasp rules of syntax; and dolphins could differentiate between “left” and “right” and understood phrases like “Ignore the next command.” Funding resumed…

Analysis of a canary’s song. Each species of bird has its own characteristic song, defined by a certain number of notes arranged in syllables and phrases. Some individuals know only one tune, while the virtuosos can sing several melodies. The canary is special: every year it forgets its song and has to invent a new one. Its testicles then become a hundred times heavier, and its brain starts producing new neurons! It’s extraordinary and still unexplained.

What had changed? In a way, Terrace’s logic continued to bear fruit. Some researchers, notably Lawrence Wieder of the University of Oklahoma, realized they needed to fully include the observer in the field of study—along with their tools, methods, and motivations. They came to understand that Terrace’s claims were greatly exaggerated, but that many interspecies “communicators” had in fact behaved like unconscious tyrants, claiming to dialogue with animals they were actually dominating—often cruelly. Terrace himself is a caricature: a cold man who claimed to teach language to Nim while keeping him locked in a cage and using no fewer than sixty (!) different trainers. Wieder easily demonstrates that under such conditions, any human child would become mentally impaired.
Everything had to be rethought. The new generation finally understood what the Gardners, as true nature lovers, had known all along: there is no communication without emotional connection and real respect for the other—even if that other is an animal.
But what does “respect” mean for an animal imprisoned in a lab? The new generation increasingly opts for the wild—insisting on equality. They aim not just to teach animals our language, but to learn theirs. More than that: they want to communicate simply for the joy of it, with no pedagogical agenda.
A bold vision: it calls for blowing up our whole attitude toward nature—our belief in being superior to all other species, the supposed pinnacle of evolution. What if animals had already reached their own kind of fulfillment—without waiting for us? Deep down, most of us intuitively sense that animals are conscious beings. But the moment we’re asked to analyze that idea, the intellect freezes: heaven help us—a consciousness in a beast’s body?! Our notion of the purely “instinctive” animal (meaning robotic) likely stems from the old Puritan separation of the vile body and noble mind. Animals were equated with the body and condemned along with it. So begins a tough metaphysical reckoning—for which there’s only one remedy: practice, fieldwork.
Roger and Debb Fouts of Washington State University resumed the Gardners’ experiments—with the same chimps. This time, using hidden cameras, they discovered that the apes used the signs they were taught to communicate with each other, even when no humans were present. Another surprise: only 5% of their exchanged signs and sounds were about food, while 88% concerned social relationships. Among themselves, chimps “talk” a lot: “Scratch me,” “Go away,” “I’m going to climb on you,” “Let’s kiss”… Researchers became more convinced that what’s needed are true communication bridges—built on equality. But what kind?
The answer comes in three stages:

1. Scientists discover, for instance, that Kenyan vervet monkeys have a real spoken language. They use six distinct alarm calls: one for leopards (everyone climbs the trees), one for eagles (everyone hides), one for snakes (everyone jumps), one for jackals, one for baboons, and one for humans. Other similar findings emerge with tigers, walruses… Human-animal phonetic dictionaries begin to take shape.

2. These sounds are recorded and played back to the animals. The most advanced in this game is Louis Hermann, a psycho-cetologist. He records the “words” (whistles, moans, clicks, tremolos, etc.) of humpback whales in Alaska, then broadcasts them underwater in Hawaii. Immediately, all the whales in the region show up and follow the broadcast boat. Conclusion: it works.

3. Researchers like Richard Ferraro, a computer scientist from Seattle, take it further: he records orca songs digitally, alters them creatively, and broadcasts them underwater. The result is astonishing: the orcas imitate the altered songs and even seem to parody the human-made changes! When we also capture ultrasonic signals, the scope becomes enormous.

Writer Rex Weyler says listening live to orca song is “like the echo of a very ancient memory, awakened by a monumental saxophone: Whaaaaaluuuuup, Waaaaaaaaaaoooooooup.” Around the same time, Katherine Payne from Cornell University discovers that elephants also communicate through song—using infrasound, inaudible to the human ear…
Still, some researchers believe the exchange is too one-sided. Musician Jim Nollman, founder of Interspecies Communication, decides to eliminate all “scientific distance”—that refuge humans use to avoid fully playing the game. For twelve years, aboard a canoe equipped with underwater speakers, Nollman has devoted himself to musical improvisation with orcas off the Canadian coast—and finds ecstasy (see Actuel no. 47).
The same goes for zoopsychiatrist Paul Spong, whose Orcalab station looks like a space lab perched on a cliff above the ocean. Spong is a passionate advocate of “equal” communication with killer whales. He discovered that orcas are just as curious about us as we are about them. They seem completely fearless—they are the true masters of the seas. More than once, Spong has wondered who is taming whom.
What a scenario! Orcas can grow up to ten meters long and weigh twenty tons. They communicate like jazz musicians and teach their young to breathe in unison with the pod. Yet we still know next to nothing about them. Spong fights to free captive orcas from aquariums—something that’s gotten him into serious trouble. He also fights to save a coastal cedar forest, where some trees are over a thousand years old—right beside the shores where his orca friends live. But a New Zealand logging company is going to cut them down anyway. And let’s not even talk about the mass slaughter of whales—mountains of music being destroyed.
Courage, Paul! In rediscovering animal consciousness (I can hear Native Americans laughing in the back of the room), humans are working to awaken their own.

Two dolphins are talking to each other: a bottlenose (on the right) and an orca. They communicate using ultrasounds, with the resonance occurring inside their noses. The bottlenose uses frequencies that are too high for humans, but the orca’s voice is partially audible to our ears. One difference between dolphins and us is that they see through sound more than through their eyes, and in three dimensions: holosons.

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