Human–animal communication
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Human–animal communication is the communication observed between humans and other animals, ranging from non-verbal cues and vocalizations to the use of language. Some human–animal communication may be observed in casual circumstances, such as the interactions between pets and their owners, which can reflect a form of spoken, while not necessarily verbal dialogue. A dog being scolded is able to grasp the message by interpreting cues such as the owner's stance, tone of voice, and
body language Body language is a type of communication in which physical behaviors, as opposed to words, are used to express or convey information. Such behavior includes facial expressions, body posture, gestures, eye movement, touch and the use of space. ...
. This communication is two-way, as owners can learn to discern the subtle differences between barks or meows, and there is a clear difference between the bark of an angry dog defending its home and the happy bark of the same animal while playing. Communication (often nonverbal) is also significant in
equestrian The word equestrian is a reference to equestrianism, or horseback riding, derived from Latin ' and ', "horse". Horseback riding (or Riding in British English) Examples of this are: *Equestrian sports *Equestrian order, one of the upper classes in ...
activities such as
dressage Dressage ( or ; a French term, most commonly translated to mean "training") is a form of horse riding performed in exhibition and competition, as well as an art sometimes pursued solely for the sake of mastery. As an equestrian sport defined by ...
. One scientific study has found that 30 bird species and 29 mammal species share the same pattern of pitch and speed in basic messages. Therefore, humans and those 59 species can understand each other when they express "aggression, hostility, appeasement, approachability, submission and fear."


Birds

Parrot Parrots, also known as psittacines (), are birds of the roughly 398 species in 92 genera comprising the order Psittaciformes (), found mostly in tropical and subtropical regions. The order is subdivided into three superfamilies: the Psittacoide ...
s are able to use words meaningfully in linguistic tasks. In particular, the
grey parrot The grey parrot (''Psittacus erithacus''), also known as the Congo grey parrot, Congo African grey parrot or African grey parrot, is an Old World parrot in the family Psittacidae. The Timneh parrot ''(Psittacus timneh)'' once was identified as ...
Alex Alex is a given name. It can refer to a shortened version of Alexander, Alexandra, Alexis. People Multiple *Alex Brown (disambiguation), multiple people *Alex Gordon (disambiguation), multiple people *Alex Harris (disambiguation), multiple p ...
learned one hundred words, and after training used English words to answer questions about color, shapes, size and numbers correctly about 80% of the time. He also wanted to try to go without training, said where he wanted to be taken, such as his cage or the back of a chair, and protested when taken elsewhere, or when hidden objects were not where he thought they were. He asked a question, what color he himself was, which has been called the only question so far asked by a non-human animal. ''Scientific American'' editor Madhusree Mukerjee described these abilities as creativity and reasoning comparable to nonhuman primates or cetaceans, while expressing concern that extensive language use resulted in
feather-plucking Feather-plucking, sometimes termed feather-picking, feather damaging behaviour or pterotillomania, is a maladaptive, behavioural disorder commonly seen in captive birds that chew, bite or pluck their own feathers with their beak, resulting in d ...
behavior, a possible sign of stress. Most bird species have at least six calls which humans can learn to understand, for situations including danger, distress, hunger, and the presence of food.
Pigeons Columbidae () is a bird family consisting of doves and pigeons. It is the only family in the order Columbiformes. These are stout-bodied birds with short necks and short slender bills that in some species feature fleshy ceres. They primarily ...
can identify different artists. Pigeons can learn to recognize up to 58 four-letter English words, with an average of 43, though they were not taught any meanings to associate with the words.
Java sparrow The Java sparrow (''Padda oryzivora''), also known as Java finch, Java rice sparrow or Java rice bird, is a small passerine bird. This estrildid finch is a resident breeding bird in Java, Bali and Bawean in Indonesia. It is a popular cage bird, ...
s chose music by sitting on a particular perch, which determined which music was played. Two birds preferred Bach and Vivaldi over Schoenberg or silence. The other two birds had varying preferences among Bach, Schoenberg, white noise and silence. The
greater honeyguide The greater honeyguide (''Indicator indicator'') is a bird in the family Indicatoridae, paleotropical near passerine birds related to the woodpeckers. Its English and scientific names refer to its habit of guiding people to bee colonies. Cla ...
has a specific call to alert humans that it can lead them to honey, and also responds to a specific human call requesting such a lead. By leading humans to honeybee hives so it can eat the discarded honeycomb wax after humans collect the honey. The human call varies regionally, so the honeyguide's response is learned in each area, not instinctive.
Crows The Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station (CROWS) is a series of remote weapon stations used by the US military on its armored vehicles and ships. It allows weapon operators to engage targets without leaving the protection of their vehicle. ...
identify and respond differently to different human faces and can be trained to understand and reply to verbal commands. Fictional portrayals of sentient talking parrots and similar birds are common in children's fiction, such as the talking, loud-mouth parrot
Iago Iago () is a fictional character in Shakespeare's ''Othello'' (c. 1601–1604). Iago is the play's main antagonist, and Othello's standard-bearer. He is the husband of Emilia, who is in turn the attendant of Othello's wife Desdemona. Iago ha ...
of Disney's ''Aladdin''.


Primates

Chimpanzees can make at least 32 sounds with distinct meanings for humans.
Chimpanzee The chimpanzee (''Pan troglodytes''), also known as simply the chimp, is a species of great ape native to the forest and savannah of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed subspecies. When its close relative t ...
s,
gorilla Gorillas are herbivorous, predominantly ground-dwelling great apes that inhabit the tropical forests of equatorial Africa. The genus ''Gorilla'' is divided into two species: the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla, and either four ...
s and
orangutan Orangutans are great apes native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. They are now found only in parts of Borneo and Sumatra, but during the Pleistocene they ranged throughout Southeast Asia and South China. Classified in the genu ...
s have used sign language, physical tokens, keyboards and touch screens to communicate with
human Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, cultu ...
s in numerous research studies. The research showed that they understood multiple signals and produced them to communicate with humans. There is some disagreement whether they can re-order them to create distinct meanings. Baboons can learn to recognize an average of 139 four-letter English words (maximum of 308), though they were not taught any meanings to associate with the words.
Primate Primates are a diverse order of mammals. They are divided into the strepsirrhines, which include the lemurs, galagos, and lorisids, and the haplorhines, which include the tarsiers and the simians ( monkeys and apes, the latter includin ...
s have also been trained to use touch screens to tell a researcher their musical preferences. In Toronto, for hundreds of songs in random order, orangutans were given one 30-second segment of a song, and then chose between repeating that segment or 30 seconds of silence. Different orangutans chose to replay from 8% to 48% of the segments, and all exhibited stress throughout the trials. There was no pattern of selections by genre, and the researchers did not look for other
attributes Attribute may refer to: * Attribute (philosophy), an extrinsic property of an object * Attribute (research), a characteristic of an object * Grammatical modifier, in natural languages * Attribute (computing), a specification that defines a prope ...
that were shared by the orangutans' chosen segments. No comparison was available as to how many 30-second segments humans would repeat in the same situation. In another experiment, the orangutans did not distinguish between music played in its original order and music sliced into half-second intervals, which were played in random order. Chimpanzees can hear higher frequencies than humans. If orangutans can too, and if these overtones are present in the recordings, the overtones would affect their choices.


Cetaceans


Lilly

In the 1960s, John C. Lilly sponsored English lessons for one
bottlenose dolphin Bottlenose dolphins are aquatic mammals in the genus ''Tursiops.'' They are common, cosmopolitan members of the family Delphinidae, the family of oceanic dolphins. Molecular studies show the genus definitively contains two species: the comm ...
(''
Tursiops truncatus Bottlenose dolphins are aquatic mammals in the genus ''Tursiops.'' They are common, cosmopolitan members of the family Delphinidae, the family of oceanic dolphins. Molecular studies show the genus definitively contains two species: the common ...
''). The teacher,
Margaret Howe Lovatt Margaret Howe Lovatt (born Margaret C. Howe, in 1942) is a former volunteer naturalist from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. In the 1960s, she took part in a NASA-funded research project in which she attempted to teach a dolphin named Peter t ...
, lived with the dolphin for months in a house on the shore of the
Virgin Islands The Virgin Islands ( es, Islas Vírgenes) are an archipelago in the Caribbean Sea. They are geologically and biogeographically the easternmost part of the Greater Antilles, the northern islands belonging to the Puerto Rico Trench and St. Cro ...
. The house was partially flooded and allowed them to be together for meals, play, language lessons, and sleep. Lilly thought of this as a mother-child dyad, though the dolphin was five to six years old. Lilly said that he had heard other dolphins repeating his own English words, and believed that an intelligent animal would want to mimic the language of its captors, to communicate. The experiment ended in the third month and did not restart, because Howe found the two-room lab and constant bumping from the dolphin too constricting. After several weeks, a concerted effort by the dolphin to imitate the instructor's speech was evident, and human-like sounds were apparent, and recorded. It was able to perform tasks such as retrieval of aurally indicated objects without fail. Later in the project the dolphin's ability to process linguistic
syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...
was made apparent, in that it could distinguish between commands such as "Bring the ball to the doll," and "Bring the doll to the ball." This ability not only demonstrates the bottlenose dolphin's grasp of basic
grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...
, but also implies the dolphins' own language might include syntactical rules. The correlation between length and 'syllables' (bursts of the dolphin's sound) with the instructor's speech also went from essentially zero at the beginning of the session to almost a perfect correlation by its completion. So that when the human spoke five or ten syllables, the dolphin also spoke five or ten 'syllables' or bursts of sound. Two experiments of this sort are explained in detail in Lilly's book, ''Mind of the Dolphin''. The first experiment was more of a test run to check psychological and other strains on the human and cetacean participants. Its goal was to determine the extent of the need for other human contact, dry clothing, time alone, and so on. Despite tensions after several weeks, Howe Lovatt agreed to the months isolated with the dolphin. Experiments by the research team of
Louis Herman Louis Herman (April 16, 1930 – August 3, 2016) was an American marine biologist. He was a researcher of dolphin sensory abilities, dolphin cognition, and humpback whales. He was professor in the Department of Psychology and a cooperating facu ...
, a former collaborator and student of Lilly's, demonstrated that dolphins could understand human communication in whistles and respond with the same whistles. A female bottlenose dolphin, Phoenix, understood at least 34 whistles. Whistles created a system of two-way communication. By having separate whistles for object and action, Herman could reorder commands without fresh teaching (take hoop to ball). Successful communication was shown when Herman used new combinations, and the dolphin understood and did what he asked without further training 80-90% of the time. In 1980, Herman had taught six whistles to a female bottle-nose dolphin, Kea, to refer to three objects and three actions, and the dolphin followed his instructions. He wrote, "In addition to mouthing the three familiar training objects in the presence of the mouth name, Kea correctly mouthed on their first appearance a plastic water pipe, a wooden disc, and the experimenter's open hand. The same type of immediate response generalization occurred for touch and fetch." Richards, Wolz and Herman (1984) trained a dolphin to make distinct whistles for objects, "so that, in effect, the dolphin gave unique vocal labels to those objects." Herman's later publications do not discuss the whistle communication. Herman started getting US Navy funding in 1985, so further expansion of the two-way whistle language would have been in the classified
United States Navy Marine Mammal Program The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP) is a program administered by the U.S. Navy which studies the military use of marine mammals - principally bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions - and trains animals to perform tasks such as ship a ...
, a
black project A black project is a highly classified, top-secret military or defense project that is not publicly acknowledged by government, military personnel, or contractors. Examples of United States military aircraft developed as black projects include the ...
. Herman also studied the crossmodal perceptual ability of dolphins. Dolphins typically perceive their environment through sound waves generated in the
melon A melon is any of various plants of the family Cucurbitaceae with sweet, edible, and fleshy fruit. The word "melon" can refer to either the plant or specifically to the fruit. Botanically, a melon is a kind of berry, specifically a "pepo". T ...
of their skulls, through a process known as echolocation (similar to that seen in bats, though the mechanism of production is different). The dolphin's eyesight however is also fairly good, even by human standards. Herman's research found that any object, even of complex and arbitrary shape, identified either by sight or sound by the dolphin, could later be correctly identified by the dolphin with the alternate sense modality with almost 100 per cent accuracy, in what is classically known in
psychology Psychology is the science, scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immens ...
and
behaviorism Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual ...
as a match-to-sample test. The only errors noted were presumed to have been a misunderstanding of the task during the first few trials, and not an inability of the dolphin's perceptual apparatus. This capacity is strong evidence for abstract and conceptual thought in the dolphin's brain, wherein an idea of the object is stored and understood not merely by its sensory properties; such abstraction may be argued to be of the same kind as complex language, mathematics, and art, and implies a potentially very great intelligence and conceptual understanding within the brains of tursiops and possibly many other cetaceans. Accordingly, Lilly's interest later shifted to
whale song Whales use a variety of sounds for communication and sensation. The mechanisms used to produce sound vary from one family of cetaceans to another. Marine mammals, including whales, dolphins, and porpoises, are much more dependent on sound than ...
and the possibility of high intelligence in the brains of large
whales Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. As an informal and colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and ...
, and Louis Herman's research at the now misnomered Dolphin Institute in
Honolulu, Hawaii Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island ...
, focuses exclusively on the
Humpback whale The humpback whale (''Megaptera novaeangliae'') is a species of baleen whale. It is a rorqual (a member of the family Balaenopteridae) and is the only species in the genus ''Megaptera''. Adults range in length from and weigh up to . The hu ...
.


Other researchers

* Batteau (1964
video
developed machines for the US Navy, which translated human voices to higher frequencies for dolphins to hear and translated dolphin voices to lower frequencies for humans to hear. The work continued at least until 1967 when the Navy classified its dolphin research. Batteau died, also in 1967, before he published results. * Reiss and McCowan (1993) taught dolphins three whistles (ball, ring, rub), which the two dolphins produced, and even combined, when playing with the ball and/or ring, or getting a rub. * Delfour and Marten (2005) gave dolphins a touchscreen to show they recognized a musical note * Kuczaj (2006) used an underwater keyboard, which humans and dolphins can touch to signal an action. * Amundin et al. (2008) had dolphins point narrow echolocation beams onto an array of hydrophones which acted like a touchscreen to communicate with the researchers
video
* Reiss (2011) used an underwater keyboard which dolphins could press. A dolphin defined a key as "I want a small fish" and Reiss (2011, p. 100) understood, but ignored it. * Herzing (2013) used an underwater keyboard in the open ocean which dolphins and humans could press to choose a plaything. * Herzing (2014) created 3 whistles for "play objects (Sargassum... scarf, and rope)", and found that wild dolphins understand them, but has not found if dolphins produce the whistles.


Historical

From Roman times to modern Brazil, dolphins have been known to drive fish toward fishermen waiting on shore, and signal to the fishermen when to throw their nets, even when water is too murky for the fishermen to see the arrival of the fish. The dolphins catch unnetted fish disoriented by the net. From about 1840 to 1920, orcas smacked the water off Twofold Bay in New South Wales to signal to human whalers that the orcas were herding large baleen whales nearby, so the humans would send boats to harpoon the whales, killing them faster and more assuredly than the orcas could. The orcas ate the tongues and lips, leaving the blubber and bones for the humans.


Dogs


Origins of Communication with Canines

It has been widely theorized that human-animal communication began with the
domestication Domestication is a sustained multi-generational relationship in which humans assume a significant degree of control over the reproduction and care of another group of organisms to secure a more predictable supply of resources from that group. ...
of dogs. Humans began communicating with
wolves The wolf (''Canis lupus''; : wolves), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of ''Canis lupus'' have been recognized, and gray wolves, as popularly un ...
before the end of the
late pleistocene The Late Pleistocene is an unofficial age in the international geologic timescale in chronostratigraphy, also known as Upper Pleistocene from a stratigraphic perspective. It is intended to be the fourth division of the Pleistocene Epoch withi ...
, and the two species eventually created a wide scale
symbiotic relationship Symbiosis (from Greek , , "living together", from , , "together", and , bíōsis, "living") is any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between two different biological organisms, be it mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasit ...
with one another. Modern biologists and anthropologists theorize that humans and wolves met near
hunting grounds Hunting Grounds (formerly known as "Howl" after the Allen Ginsberg poem of the same name) are a six piece Australian punk band. They formed at Ballarat High School and won Triple J Triple J (stylised in all lowercase) is a government-fund ...
, and as the Homo sapien diet began relying more and more on meat for development, they would often encounter and compete with wolves. Humans' relationship with wolves garnered a mutual benefit, obtaining food and protection. Humans likely began attempting to cooperate with wolves through commands, which eventually led to a more familiar species of dogs that we know today. These commands were likely the first instances of
obedience training Dog training is the application of behavior analysis which uses the environmental events of antecedents (trigger for a behavior) and consequences to modify the dog behavior, either for it to assist in specific activities or undertake particular ...
upon canines, as dogs maintained a
pack mentality Herd behavior is the behavior of individuals in a group acting collectively without centralized direction. Herd behavior occurs in animals in herds, packs, bird flocks, fish schools and so on, as well as in humans. Voting, demonstrations, riot ...
that humans fit into as the alpha.
Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several pa ...
humans developed, seemingly unintentionally, a system of
artificial selection Selective breeding (also called artificial selection) is the process by which humans use animal breeding and plant breeding to selectively develop particular phenotypic traits (characteristics) by choosing which typically animal or plant mal ...
with both
livestock Livestock are the domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to provide labor and produce diversified products for consumption such as meat, eggs, milk, fur, leather, and wool. The term is sometimes used to refer solely to ani ...
and animal companions, ushering in a widespread sustenance based foundation of humans communicating with animals. New theories within academic discussion of scientific data refer to this as both prezygotic and postzygotic “strong” artificial selection. Humans began controlling the offspring of livestock during the agricultural revolution through the mating of high yielding animals. Theories from anthropologists suggest that humans began differing relationships with canines during the neolithic age. This is possibly when humans began keeping dogs as pets, creating a new form of communication with domesticated animals, pet talk.


Dogs communicating to humans

In a
Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it ...
article from May 1884, John Lubbock described experiments teaching a dog to read text commands on cardboard cards. Bonnie Bergin trained dogs to go to specific text on the wall to ask clearly for "water, treat or pet me." Dogs were able to learn English or Japanese text. She says service dogs can learn to find EXIT signs, bathroom gender signs, and report what disease they smell in a urine sample by going to a sign on the wall naming that disease. Police and private dogs can be trained to "alert" when they find certain scents, including drugs, explosives, mines, scent of a suspect, fire accelerants, and bed bugs. The alert can be a specific bark or position, and can be accepted as evidence in court.
Stanley Coren Stanley Coren (born 1942) is a psychology professor, neuropsychological researcher and writer on the intelligence, mental abilities and history of dogs. He works in research and instructs in psychology at the University of British Columbia in V ...
identifies 56 signals which untrained dogs make and people can understand, including ten barks, five growls, eight other vocalizations, 11 tail signals, five ear and eye positions, five mouth signals and 12 body positions. Faragó et al. describe research that humans can accurately categorize barks from unseen dogs as aggressive, playful, or stressed, even if they do not own a dog. This recognizability has led to machine learning algorithms to categorize barks, and commercial products and apps such as
BowLingual , or "Bow-Lingual" as the North American version is spelled, is a computer-based dog language-to-human language translation device developed by Japanese toy company Takara and first sold in Japan in 2002. Versions for South Korea and the United S ...
.


Humans communicating to dogs

Dogs can be trained to understand hundreds of spoken words, including Chaser (1,022 words), Betsy (340 words),
Rico The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. RICO was en ...
(200 words), and others. They can react appropriately when a human uses verbs and nouns in new combinations, such as "fetch ball" or "paw frisbee." Bergin trained dogs to obey 20 written commands on flashcards, in Roman or Japanese characters, including 🚫 to keep them away from an area. Shepherds and others have developed detailed commands to tell
herding dogs Herding is the act of bringing individual animals together into a group (herd), maintaining the group, and moving the group from place to place—or any combination of those. Herding can refer either to the process of animals forming herds in ...
when to move, stop, collect or separate herd animals.


Mutual communication

Claims of interspecies communication between dogs and humans, with the use of sound buttons, have prompted researchers at the University of California, at San Diego to begin an ongoing research effort (as of June 2021) into potential
canine Canine may refer to: Zoology and anatomy * a dog-like Canid animal in the subfamily Caninae ** ''Canis'', a genus including dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals ** Dog, the domestic dog * Canine tooth, in mammalian oral anatomy People with the surn ...
linguistic capabilities.


Felines

Human- Feline communication is dated to at least 9,500-10,000 B.C. according to archeological evidence from the
Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several pa ...
village of
Shillourokambos Shillourokambos ( el, Σιλλουρόκαμπος) is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) site near Parekklisia, 6 km east of Limassol in southern Cyprus. It is located on a low plateau. Excavations began in 1992. The settlement has four phases ...
on the
Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on ...
island of
Cyprus Cyprus ; tr, Kıbrıs (), officially the Republic of Cyprus,, , lit: Republic of Cyprus is an island country located south of the Anatolian Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Its continental position is disputed; while it is ...
. Human and cat remains were found buried together along with ceremonial seashells, polished stones, and other decorative artifacts. This burial between a human and feline companion suggests that the two species had begun building a relationship with one another. Feline companions began with the establishment of organized wide-scale agriculture, as humans needed a way to exterminate vermin which inhabited food stores. Evidence of the regular domestication of felines started around 5,000 B.C. in Ancient Egypt with cats becoming a tool which humans kept near food surpluses as agriculture became more widespread and regulated. Cats are known to possess a commensal relationship with humans, and are treated as regular housepets. Modern felines often perform no real duties and are housetrained. Human owners communicate with these felines through pet talk, yet there is little to no evidence that felines can understand humans or are capable of consistent training, most cases are individual and replication can be very difficult.


Other animal training

Humans teach animals specific responses for specific conditions or stimuli. Training may be for purposes such as companionship, detection, protection, research and entertainment. During training humans communicate their wishes with positive or negative reinforcement. After training is finished the human communicates by giving signals with words, whistles, gestures, body language, etc.
APOPO APOPO (an acronym for Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling: "Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development" in English) is a registered Belgian non-governmental organisation and US non-profit which trains southern gian ...
has trained
Southern giant pouched rat The southern giant pouched rat (''Cricetomys ansorgei'') is a species of rodent in the family Nesomyidae. It is distributed in the savannah of East and Southern Africa. Synonyms A large number of synonyms have been noted for this species. They i ...
s to communicate to humans the presence of
land mines A land mine is an explosive device concealed under or on the ground and designed to destroy or disable enemy targets, ranging from combatants to vehicles and tanks, as they pass over or near it. Such a device is typically detonated automati ...
, by scratching the ground, and
tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, ...
in medical samples. They identify 40% more cases of tuberculosis than clinics do, an extra 12,000 cases from 2007 to 2017. They have identified 100,000 mines from 2003 to 2017, certifying as mine-free. They are accurate enough that the human trainers run on the land after removing the mines which rats have identified.
Rats Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents. Species of rats are found throughout the order Rodentia, but stereotypical rats are found in the genus ''Rattus''. Other rat genera include ''Neotoma'' (pack rats), '' Bandicota'' (bandicoot ...
(Wistar, ''Rattus norvegicus'') have been taught to distinguish and respond differently to different human
faces The face is the front of an animal's head that features the eyes, nose and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions. The face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may affe ...
.
Patricia McConnell Patricia Bean McConnell (born November 16, 1948) is an Adjunct Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and expert in animal behavior. She has written several books, including ''The Other End of the Leash,'' ''For the Love of a ...
found that handlers around the world, speaking 16 languages, working with camels, dogs, donkeys, horses and water buffalo, all use long sounds with a steady pitch to tell animals to go more slowly (whoa, euuuuuu), and they use short repeated sounds, often rising in pitch, to speed them up or bring them to the handler (Go, Go, Go, claps, clicks). Chimpanzees, dogs, gulls, horses, rats, roosters, sheep and sparrows all use similar short repeated sounds to tell others of the same species to come closer. Even fish, which lack a
neocortex The neocortex, also called the neopallium, isocortex, or the six-layered cortex, is a set of layers of the mammalian cerebral cortex involved in higher-order brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, generation of motor commands, sp ...
, have been taught to distinguish and respond differently to different human
faces The face is the front of an animal's head that features the eyes, nose and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions. The face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may affe ...
(archerfish) or styles of music (goldfish and koi). Molluscs, with totally different brain designs, have been taught to distinguish and respond to symbols (cuttlefish and octopus), and have been taught that food behind a clear barrier cannot be eaten (squid). A harbor seal,
Hoover Hoover may refer to: Music * Hoover (band), an American post-hardcore band * Hooverphonic, a Belgian band originally named Hoover * Hoover (singer), Willis Hoover, a country and western performer active in 1960s and '70s * "Hoover" (song), a 2016 ...
learned to speak several phrases in understandable English as a pup from his human foster parent and used these in appropriate circumstances during his later life at the New England Aquarium until he died in 1985. Other talking animals have been studied, though they did not always use their phrases in meaningful contexts.


Animal communication as entertainment

Though animal communication has always been a topic of public comment and attention, for a period in history it surpassed this and became sensational popular entertainment. From the late 18th century through the mid 19th century, a succession of "
learned pig The learned pig was a pig taught to respond to commands in such a way that it appeared to be able to answer questions by picking up cards in its mouth. By choosing cards it answered arithmetical problems and spelled out words. The "learned pig" c ...
s" and various other animals were displayed to the public in for-profit performances, boasting the ability to communicate with their owners (often in more than one language), write, solve math problems, and the like. One poster, dated 1817, shows a group of "
Java sparrow The Java sparrow (''Padda oryzivora''), also known as Java finch, Java rice sparrow or Java rice bird, is a small passerine bird. This estrildid finch is a resident breeding bird in Java, Bali and Bawean in Indonesia. It is a popular cage bird, ...
s" who are advertised as knowing seven languages, including Chinese and Russian.


Other Information

There are many evolving and unique ways that humans interact with animals. Human evolution from using animals for sport has evolved into many of them seen as common house pets. Human language differs greatly from animal communication in the sense that everything in context-dependent. There have been multiple claims and eventual studies conducted to help highlight the difference in animal communication and human communication being heavily reliant on context. The communication systems of other animals help to showcase many of the differences that exist. The term `indexicality' has been utilized to indicate the characteristic way of using the context in human language. Opposed to the more general term of context-dependence and the relating situation in animal communication systems. Human communication with animals has been around for centuries and exists all across the world. Indigenous people have relied on their communication skills to speak and coexist with birds, grazers, and hunters. They have been able to share the land with these animals and eventually adopt animals such as dogs and cats. However, there has always been a stigma surrounding the intelligence of animal communication compared to that of human. That belief however has begun to shift. Humans have begun to understand animal communication on a far deeper level as technology has allowed for the conversion of experiences throughout time to coexist with the findings of today. Communicating with animals will continue to grow and evolve. It has been around since the test of time and has the potential to grow exponentially more.


See also

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Alex (parrot) Alex (May 1976 – 6 September 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Ale ...
*
Animal cognition Animal cognition encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals including insect cognition. The study of animal conditioning and learning used in this field was developed from comparative psychology. It has also been strongly influen ...
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Animal communication Animal communication is the transfer of information from one or a group of animals (sender or senders) to one or more other animals (receiver or receivers) that affects the current or future behavior of the receivers. Information may be sent int ...
*
Animal consciousness Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within a non-human animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, aware ...
*
Animal intelligence Animal cognition encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals including insect cognition. The study of animal conditioning and learning used in this field was developed from comparative psychology. It has also been strongly influence ...
* Anna Breytenbach *
Clever Hans Clever Hans (German: ''der Kluge Hans''; c. 1895 - c. 1916) was a horse that was claimed to have performed arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was ...
*
Great ape language Research into great ape language has involved teaching chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans to communicate with humans and with each other using sign language, physical tokens, lexigrams, and mimicking human speech. Some primatologists ...
*
Interspecies communication Interspecies communication is communication between different species of animals, plants, or microorganisms. Mutualism Cooperative interspecies communication implies sharing and understanding information between two or more species that work tow ...
* Talking animal


Bibliography

* Sebeok, Thomas – ''Essays in Zoosemiotics'' (1990) * Myers, Arthur – ''Communicating With Animals: The Spiritual Connection Between People and Animals'' (1997) * Boehner, Bruce Thomas – ''Parrot Culture: Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird'' (2004) * Summers, Patty – ''Talking With the Animals'' (1998) * Jay, Ricky – ''Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women'' (1987) * Gurney, Carol – ''The Language of Animals: 7 Steps to Communicating with Animals'' (2001) * Grandin, Temple – '' Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior'' (2004) * Ruesch, Jurgen, and Weldon Kees. ''Nonverbal Communication : Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations''. University of California Press, 1956. * Hurn, Samantha. ''Humans and Other Animals : Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions''. Pluto Press, 2012. Accessed 24 Feb. 2022. * Bradshaw, G. A. “You See Me, but Do You Hear Me? The Science and Sensibility of Trans-Species Dialogue.” ''Feminism & Psychology'', vol. 20, no. 3, Aug. 2010, pp. 407–19. ''EBSCOhost'', https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353510368285. * Brown, Peter. “Talking Points.” ''Natural History'', vol. 113, no. 9, Nov. 2004, p. 8. ''EBSCOhost'', https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=14772118&site=ehost-live. * Perconti, Pietro. “Context-Dependence in Human and Animal Communication.” ''Foundations of Science'', vol. 7, no. 3, Sept. 2002, pp. 341–62. ''EBSCOhost'', https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019613210814.


References


External links


Animal Communication Project
{{Great ape language