All wolves have an accent – and every dolphin has a name
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, like Dr Dolittle, you could talk to the animals? How satisfying it would be to ask your cat where it disappeared to for three days, or quiz your dog about why it has such a deep loathing for next door’s terrier?
We humans have always been fascinated by the idea of talking animals. They appear in the Bible and in Icelandic mythology, and children’s fiction is chock-a-block with them. Yet it’s only relatively recently that scientists have accepted that animals really do have their own language.
The breakthrough came in the 1920s, with the decoding of the way honey bees communicate as they forage for nectar and pollen. If bees could ‘speak’ to each other – in their case, through a sort of dance – then it seemed obvious that all that roaring, howling, squeaking and chirruping that animals make wasn’t just random noise but had a purpose.
According to zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, one of the chattiest animals on the planet is the dolphin. Spend any time underwater with these friendly, playful animals and you’ll hear their endless stream of clicks, whistles and buzzes. Dolphins do something no other animal does: they give themselves a ‘name’, or individual identity, by producing a unique whistle that identifies them to other dolphins.
Mothers separated from their calves use this signature whistle to call for their offspring, and a dolphin will react with excitement when it hears the whistle of another dolphin it hasn’t seen for a while. But no researcher has yet deciphered what the rest of their whistling means.
Wolves are almost as talkative as dolphins. They cover a huge area of land every day in their quest for food, but their howling ability means they never lose touch with their pack. ‘Wolves do not howl to each other simply to threaten or to intimidate, but to communicate as casually as we might text a friend,’ Kershenbaum writes.
Intriguingly, a wolf ’s howl differs depending on where it lives. European wolves have a long, low-pitched howl that is flat and monotonous. The howl of the American timber wolf has a rise and fall in pitch, while Arctic wolves have a higher-pitched howl. Kershenbaum and his team researched the regional accents of the wolf after one of his colleagues complained about a howler (literal and metaphorical) in a horror film she’d seen: although set in Transylvania, to her expert ears the wolves in the movie clearly had a North American howl.
Why Animals Talk is packed with insights, about how animals speak but it’s ultimately frustrating because, for all the work scientists have put into inter-species communication, we humans are no closer to being able to communicate with animals. Perhaps Artificial Intelligence might one day unlock the puzzle and allow us to have a cosy chat with our pets. Or maybe, as Kershenbaum says, we need to accept we may never crack the code for any language but our own.