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Introduction: Human-Nonhuman Animal Communication
Human communication overwhelmingly privileges verbal language in speech and
writing, although words are not the only means of communication available to humans. At this
moment I am speaking English words written on the page, but if you are not a speaker of
English, you may be “reading me” by paying attention to my extra-lingual communication
channels—my facial expressions, my gestures, my postures and physical movements that are my
“body language” (but probably you are relying most heavily on the verbal translation provided
by your instructors). You may also be attending to my nonverbal auditory channels—my
intonations and inflections, my modulations of volume and pitch—in concert with my body
language. If you speak to me in Polish, a language I do not understand, I will rely on these extraverbal channels in an effort to interpret the meaning and intentions behind your speech.
Today I am proposing an understanding of “language” that is broader than words. My
starting point is the pragmatics theory of the linguistic philosopher John L. Austin, who, in How
to Do Things with Words, described human language as one very potent form of human social
behavior or social action. According to Austin, verbal communication is more than a simple
process of encoding and decoding semantic meaning in words; verbal language doesn’t just say
things—it actually does things, conveying various kinds and degrees of intentional force (e.g.,
assertions, directions, commissions, expressions, declarations) that an interlocutor may or may
not discern and accept. Austin begins with ritualized speech acts, his term for verbal social
action. Among these speech acts are christenings and wedding vows. Unless the right words are
spoken at the right times and settings, by the right people, the ship or child has not been named,
and the marriage has not been performed. Birth and marriage certificates, property deeds, legal
statutes and promissory notes are examples of “speech acts” converted into written form.
When the uptake, or interpretation and response to a speech act accords with the
intentional force behind it, the verbal communication is, in Austin’s terminology, felicitous:
information has been exchanged, persuasion has occurred, an agreement has been negotiated,
ownership has been transferred, a deal has been sealed, a reward or punishment has been
decreed. In short, a relationship has been established; social reality has been engineered through
a verbal exchange. When intention and interpretation do not accord, the words fail, creating a
communicative state that Austin calls infelicitous.
When verbal language appears in written form, of course, extra-verbal channels are not
available, though written language may be augmented by illustrations or photos or other visual
cues. If you write to me in Polish, your intended meaning is compressed into visual symbols
detached from your voice and your body and becomes transportable across time and space. In
my efforts to interpret your meaning, I’m reduced to familiar punctuation marks and verbal
cognates with English or another language I can read. Written language as well as old and new
forms of telecommunication demonstrate that for humans, communication does not necessarily
require the actual presence of more than one human being at a time. The same is not true for
human communication with nonhuman animals, although the sensory systems of some
animals—elephants and whales, for instance—enable intra-species communication across
considerable distances.
When humans attempt to communicate with nonhuman animals, verbal language is of
little use, just as the bat’s echolocation system is of little use if the bat were intent on
communicating with us. An exception to intra-species verbal communication can be found in a
handful of laboratory studies in which nonhuman apes or dolphins have been taught some form
of verbal signing or lexigram use. In one longitudinal laboratory study, an African grey parrot
named Alex is famous for having learned to converse with humans using English words and
sentences in apparently meaningful exchanges. Outside of the laboratory, dogs, horses and other
domesticated animals are often taught to discriminate among nouns that name familiar objects or
to respond to verbal commands, but in such cases verbal communication is a one-way channel
used by humans to stimulate a response from nonhuman animals; it is not a medium for
conversation or dialogue, as humans cannot “listen” to other animals in this medium, nor can
other animals “speak.”
Nearly all communication between human and nonhuman animals requires mutual
animal presence within the range of both parties’ sensory perceptions, and it requires humans to
activate extra-verbal modes of expression and interpretation. I hope I have made it clear that in
using the phrase “human communication with nonhuman animals” I mean something more
complex than humans giving commands to non-human animals. Austin’s speech action model of
communication requires mutual attention and mutually coordinated intentionality. To
communicate with other animals, humans have to exercise non-verbal and to some extent “nonrational” ways of paying attention, recognizing, and responding to nonhuman intentionality.
Communication of this type requires broad engagement of the human sensorium beyond the
exclusively human channel of verbal language. Communication with other animals requires
human understanding of how other animals function as nonhuman sensoria.
Biologists describe a sensorium as the totality of an organism’s sensory and interpretive
capacities—its physical senses, its phenomenal and psychological perceptions, its cognition and
intelligence. All forms of life qualify in some sense as sensoria because all are equipped with
sensory channels for negotiating relationships between their organic selves and their surrounding
environments, including social relationships with other organisms inhabiting the
environment. Nonhuman life forms “relate to” their environments through sensory channels that
may overlap but are not wholly congruent with our own.
In “What is it like to be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel pondered the challenge
of comprehending how nonhuman sensoria experience and interpret the world we share. Even if
we were to hang upside down from rafters, Nagel explains, our human bodies would not
experience or interpret this state as bats do, somatically designed for flight, their auditory
perception attuned to sound waves inaccessible to human hearing, and their socio-cognitive
powers attuned to insect prey, raptor predators, and the communal presence of other bats. Nagel
concludes that we can never know what it is like to be a bat; we can only experience “batness”
through an act of imagination, itself a higher-order mental function we generally regard as a
uniquely human mode of perception.
The belief that understanding and therefore communicating with other animals is an act
of imagination or fantasy finds expression in academic contexts as an anthropomorphic
projection of human intentions and perceptions onto other animals, or as an anthropocentric
translation of other animals’ phenomenological realities into forms of experience recognizable to
humans. Such explanations derive from an identity theory of human uniqueness. Beyond the
kind of biological uniqueness that distinguishes all species as species, human uniqueness theory
in academic and other contexts often presumes radical separation between humans and all other
species on the basis of human intellectual and moral or spiritual superiority over all other
animals by virtue of our rational minds. This radical separation is often pinned to the intellectual
technology of human language, the human capacity to enact symbolic logic through words and
numbers. The uniqueness of human language among animals prompted Noam Chomsky to
theorize language as a “black box” in the human brain and Steven Pinker to describe language as
instinctive human behavior (See Penn, et al.’s discussion of the relationship between human
language and human uniqueness).
The argument for human uniqueness maintains that human language, both a medium
and a product of human cognition, drives the development of human culture, which in turn
presumably removes humans from the realm of nature, granting humanity a unique exemption
from the natural laws that govern other living beings. Such a perspective dismisses or minimizes
biological commonalities born of common biological origins, the premise of an alternative,
Darwinian perspective known as human continuity.
The American naturalist writer Henry Beston famously criticized the limitations of the
“exemptionalist” logic of human uniqueness theory in his final reflection on a year in the North
American coastal biome of Cape Cod:
We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken
form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not
be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more
finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,
living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they
are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.
However the academic argument over human uniqueness and continuity might be
resolved, the language-learning challenge of communication with other animal “Nations” seems
an increasingly miraculous accomplishment in an era often called the Anthropocene, an era when
human biomass swells across the planet, and a rapidly urbanizing and “wired” human culture
grows increasingly estranged from the rest of nature. Such estrangement (the environmental
educator, Richard Louv, has called it “nature deficit disorder”) reinforces academic and religious
positions that exclude other animals from the category of beings that are not only sentient but
also intentional.
A world view that includes other animals as intentional beings with whom humans can
communicate fits more comfortably with the narrative logic of myth than to the analytic logic of
science. Stories of people who “talk to animals” cross human cultures, as we find in examples
such as King Solomon, whose magic ring enabled him to hear and understand the voices of other
animals; St. Francis of Assisi, who reasoned with the wolf who terrorized the village of Gubbio;
Hiawatha, the Native American hero of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, The Song of
Hiawatha, who learned not only the names but the languages of the animals he knew as
“brothers”; and the protagonist of early 20th-century British children’s stories, Dr. Dolittle, who
conversed with his animal patients in their own languages.
These storied figures possess mysterious, superhuman perceptive and interpretive
powers inaccessible to normal human beings, framing human-nonhuman animal communication
as a paranormal activity that violates or exceeds rational understanding. Today, if you Google
“human animal communicator,” your search will yield a host of present-day inheritors of this
mythology. Professional animal communicators generally describe their communication with
other animals as telepathic. The term “telepathy” means “distant feeling,” and the emphasis on
feeling means that the communication is sensory and affective rather than rational and
verbal. While technology makes communication across distance commonplace for many
humans, some animal communicators claim to bridge extrasensory distances without
technological assistance. Often they describe their interactions with other animals as an
exchange of mental pictures or physical sensations. Some claim the capacity to establish
nonverbal connections with animals they do not actually meet but whose intentional essence they
perceive through conversations with people who know and describe them. And some animal
communicators claim to establish connections with nonhuman animals via phone or email
conversations with humans who describe the animals; a few even claim the ability to establish
contact with animals who have died, a claim that likens human-animal communication to séances
and positions it squarely in the realm of the supernatural.
While telepathic human-animal communication is easily dismissed as paranormal
nonsense or magical thinking, it is instructive in pointing out the limitations of human language
and proposing that communicative channels other than words might be opened. The magic or
miracle of human communication with nonhuman animals may simply be the engagement of
sensory channels that, as Benson suggests, have atrophied through human failure to use
them. The famous case of Clever Hans, the German horse who amazed crowds in the late 19thcentury by correctly answering mathematical questions, is instructive here. Hans was not really
doing mathematical calculations, but he was reading intentions in human body language when
his human informants were themselves unaware that they were “speaking.” Their cues were not
the sort that most humans would perceive or recognize as meaningful—slight postural shifts,
changes in respiration or muscle tension when Hans’ hoof-tapping reached the correct answer—
but Hans was clearly perceiving these signals as intentional. The same kind of unconscious,
human-to-nonhuman animal communication underlies the familiar notion that dogs can “smell
fear,” or that cats or dogs know when their human companions are on the way home. To our
human sensoria, these animal capacities to read human intentions seem miraculous, but to other
species they may simply be “common sense.”
The animal behaviorist Alexandra Horowitz in Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell,
and Know (2009) describes the canine sensorium as a canine Umwelt, that is, the world as
experienced by an organism whose sense of smell is up to 100,000 times as powerful as ours,
whose ears can move independently to locate sound sources and perceive pitches well outside
our range, and whose visual field is approximately 60 degrees wider than the average human’s,
less acutely attuned to color, and closer to ground.
Recognition of nonhuman animals’ different Umwelts is the cornerstone of the
phenomenon known as animal whispering, the seemingly uncanny ability of some people to
understand and communicate with other animals. The original whisperer is often identified as an
eighteenth-century, uneducated, impoverished, Irish horse trainer named Dan Sullivan, whose
handling method was so mysteriously quiet that he had only to whisper in a vicious horse’s ear to
make the animal tame and cooperative. In fact, however, the connection between whispering and
horse training long preceded Sullivan in public rituals performed by members of the Secret
Society of Horsemen, a trade guild that arose in northeast Scotland in the late middle ages and
eventually spread to England, North America, and Australia. Veterinarian and historian Russell
Lyon reports that the horseman’s craft and trade blossomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries when a convergence of developments in plough design, horse breeding practices, and
demand for agricultural products increased the need for effective management of horses, then
still the primary source of power in agriculture. According to Lyon, by the middle of the
nineteenth century in the British Isles, the Horseman’s Society was so powerful that “no farmer
could work his fields without a horseman who was a member of the Society.”
The Horsemen safeguarded their professional secrets with private and public rituals,
including initiation rites, a special handshake and a secret motto. Public advertisements for the
society included the Horseman’s demonstration upon first meeting a new horse of gaining a
horse’s compliance by standing close with a hand on the horse’s muzzle while whispering the
Society’s secret motto into its ear. Other public demonstrations of a Horseman’s special powers
entailed leading horses home from auction without ropes or halters, and driving them in the
fields without bits, bridles, or reins. According to Lyons, the real secret of the Horsemen’s ability
to communicate with horses was likely olfactory stimulation. To bond with a new horse, a
Horseman fed it an oatcake laced with scented herbs (to banish the previous handler’s scent) and
saturated with the new Horseman’s sweat (a replacement scent). This and other secret recipes
made use of the heightened olfactory sensitivity of the horse, an animal subject to flight and
reliant on nose as well as eyes and ears for early detection of danger and perception of safety.
The public ruse of controlling horses by whispering words in their ears ironically
protected the Horseman’s secrets of wordless communication. Though contemporary horse
whisperers like the American Monty Roberts describe their communication as a language of
space and movement rather than smells, both old and new horse whisperers have understood the
importance of communication on the horse’s own terms and in the horse’s own
“language.” Roberts extends Austin’s understanding of language as socially functional behavior
beyond the verbal language of human beings to include the behavioral language native to horses,
a language Roberts calls Equus. Training horses, for Roberts, occurs through an interspecies
dialogue and requires humans to learn the communication system natural to the horse, to join the
horse’s “linguistic community” rather than insisting that the horse to join ours. Many horse
whisperers today explicitly develop this expanded, extra-verbal sense of language and voice,
emphasizing the dialogic quality of human-nonhuman animal communication. Roberts describes
his work as “listening” rather than whispering to horses, stressing receptive attention to the
horse’s “voice”: “A good trainer can hear a horse speak to him. A great trainer can hear him
whisper.”
Since the hey day of the Horseman’s Society, the concept of whispering has become
generalized beyond horse training to include communication with many nonhuman species,
based on an understanding of that species’ “native language,” derived from its particular
sensorium and Umwelt. In the United States, the popular National Geographic television series
has made the name of Mexican-born Cesar Milan synonymous with the term “dog whisperer,” a
label that dog trainer Paul Owens claims as well. In the U.S., the autistic animal behaviorist
Temple Grandin, inventor of cattle holding and routing equipment used around the world, is
frequently described as a “cow whisperer.” Mieshelle Nagelschneider claims the identity of “cat
whisperer” in her book of that title, but she is by no means the only cat handler to whom the
descriptor applies. Recently, Jackson Galaxy, star of the Animal Planet series “My Cat from
Hell,” gained attention as the “cat whisperer” called to intervene after a Portland, Oregon
family’s 22-pound Himalayan-cross attacked a 7-month-old child and forced the child, his
parents and the family dog to seek refuge in a locked bedroom where they called for police
assistance. Many other animal trainers, although they don’t necessarily call themselves
“whisperers” use the metaphor of language, describing their work as “listening” (Monty Roberts
and Jan Fennel) “talking” or “speaking” (Henry Blake, Barbara Woodhouse, Stanley Coren,
Bash Dibra), or “translating” (Temple Grandin).
Animal whisperers who gain public renown generally do so through their successful
handling of “problem” animals—vicious dogs or horses deemed dangerous to humans or other
animals, or domestic animals who exhibit behaviors considered anti-social in human
environments, such as inappropriate urination and defecation, or destruction of human
property. While some whisperers, like animal communicators, may market their professional
skills as extraordinary human capacities, most assume the role of public educators and try to
explain their training methods to other human beings. They generally insist that the majority of
“problems” they solve stem from people’s poor handling methods rather than animals’ ill
tempers and transgressive behaviors, and they may describe their jobs as training animals’
human companions rather than training the animals themselves. As public educators, wellknown animal whisperers in the English-speaking world publish books, conduct workshops, and
explain their animal handling techniques in television series and educational videos, generally
emphasizing the need to watch for behavioral signals of animals’ internal states—their
dispositions, their interpretations of their environments and their intentions. Cat whisperers, for
example, advise their clients and fans to attend to tail, ear, and whisker signals as well as
postures and vocalizations; dog whisperers emphasize canine signaling through posture, gaze,
vocalization and facial expression; and horse whisperers describe a spatial language of approach
and avoidance, as well as body language signals through ear, head and tail positions, and
indicators of dispositional states such as licking and chewing, which signal submission.
In the academic world, ethologists, who study animals’ social behaviors, join whisperers
in subscribing to a broadened sense of “language.” In King Solomon’s Ring, a book whose title
refers to the legendary ring that enabled Solomon to understand other animals’ language, Konrad
Lorenz, the Austrian pioneer in the field of ethology, asserted that unaided by magic, he could
understand and communicate with other species. “I am not joking by any means,” Lorenz
assured his readers, explaining that all social animals employ some sort of “signal code” with its
own “vocabulary” and that “by knowing the ‘vocabulary’ of some highly social species of beast
or bird it is often possible to attain to an astonishing intimacy and mutual understanding.” Lorenz
insisted that the stories in King Solomon’s Ring adhere strictly to “scientific fact,” telling of
relationships that admit empirical scrutiny and scientific explanation. A commitment to scientific
knowledge coupled with a desire to communicate this knowledge to a general readership was, for
Lorenz, an act of professional ethics. “Why should not the comparative ethologist who makes it
his business to know animals more thoroughly than anybody else, tell stories about their private
lives?” he asks. “Every scientist should, after all, regard it as his duty to tell the public, in a
generally intelligible way, about what he is doing.” Lorenz sought to fulfill his moral obligation
to share his professional knowledge with the general public by writing several works of popular
science; in addition to King Solomon’s Ring, the best known of these is Man Meets Dog, in
which an account of the co-evolution of Homo-sapiens and Canis familiaris is liberally
punctuated with Lorenz’s whimsical drawings and stories of the dogs that have participated in
his family’s history.
In their efforts to promote “multilingualism” within the human population, ethologists
and whisperers alike advocate an understanding of other animals through familiarity rather than
mastery. This distinction is made in the German language by two separate verbs, wissen and
kennen, for what the English language denotes with the single verb “to know.” Wissen, the root
of the German word Wissenschaft, meaning scientific knowledge, is a detached, analytic mode of
knowing in keeping with scientific method, while kennen describes relational knowledge gained
through kinship [American President George W. Bush was claiming this kind of knowledge of
Russian President Vladimir Putin (kennen) when he famously asserted after a private
conversation with Putin at the 2001 Summit in Slovenia,
I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy, and
we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He’s a man deeply
committed to his country and the best interests of his country, and I appreciate very much
the frank dialogue and that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship.
Here, Bush describes probing eye-to-eye contact between two alpha males as the behavioral
opening to spiritual communication (looking into one another’s “soul”). He recalls his reading
of Putin’s intentions in nonverbal terms, as “a sense of his soul.” Finding Putin’s soul or
intentional essence to be “trustworthy,” Bush predicts that the two men’s trusting and trustful
“dialogue” will unfold as a “relationship,” a prediction that he took steps to enact by inviting
Putin to visit him on his ranch in Texas. The narrative, I think you’ll agree, partakes of the
mythology of supernatural contact between essential beings or souls, and its emphasis on a twoway dialogue of trust echoes the whisperers’ and ethologists’ insistence on listening as well as
speaking quietly in a dialogue that develops as deepening relational knowledge. While we may
question the accuracy of Bush’s reading of Putin, the story of their interaction suggests the extent
to which humans can and do activate extra-verbal communication channels even among
themselves.
A human doesn’t have to be an animal whisperer to understand what it means to regard
other animals with the intent of developing relational knowledge and establishing kinship
through some kind of dialogue. “I know (Ich kann) my dogs, my cats and my horse in a way that
is similar to how I know my sons and my daughter, and the way I know all nine of these
creatures is different from the way I would know other animals if I were, say, a scientist who
knows (weisst) and writes about unnamed rats who are research subjects in a laboratory
experiment, or a veterinary surgeon assessing a patient’s anatomical status. The various kinds of
human-nonhuman animal communication I’ve considered in this paper point to an enhanced
relational sense of human self through the exercise of extra-verbal communication channels and
the adoption of an epistemology the neuro-philosopher Daniel Dennett has called “the intentional
stance”—meaning, in this case, the assumption that nonhuman animals are centers of
intentionality, or in the words of Val Plumwood “potential communicants” with whom social
relationships are both desirable and possible. The larger question my inquiry into humannonhuman animal communication serves is the question of how we humans can develop and
practice an ecological awareness of self in nature—a revision of human consciousness variously
framed by environmental thinkers as “deep ecology” (Arne Naess), “transpersonal ecology”
(Warwick Fox), “land ethic” (Aldo Leopold), “Eco-Mind” (Frances Moore Lappe) “ecological
intelligence” (Ian McCallum), “ecological rationality” (Val Plumwood), “Gaia sense”
(Lovelock), “a systems understanding of life” (Fritjof Capra) and “biophilia” (Edward O.
Wilson). Environmental scientists and activists agree that an interconnected or relational sense
of human self, consistent with but exceeding scientific knowledge of the biosphere is a necessary
platform for the revision of humanity’s environmentally destructive behavior in the
Anthropocene. Accepting the possibility, the challenge and the responsibility of communication
with nonhuman animals may, for many human beings, be a first step in what must ultimately be
a global consciousness-raising project.
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