From Thinking about to Thinking with Other Animals
This brief investigation into the language games of mimicry, alarm calls, grammar, and meta-communication shows us that there is great variety in the ways that other animals express themselves, make sense of the world around them, respond, and connect to others. To further develop a non-anthropocentric view of language, however, it is not enough to simply study other animal languages. While existing concepts, such as mimicry and grammar, can function as tools in understanding other animals and working towards better relations, they should rather be seen as starting points, not end points. In this chapter, the focus has mostly been on the scientific study of animal languages, which is itself a specific set of language games. In these language games non-human animals often do not have access to how experiments are set up, even though they clearly exercise agency. However, humans and other animals also live together, and form common worlds in which language often plays a formative role. In the next chapter I turn to investigating these relations further by focusing on the relation between language and world and the building of common interspecies worlds.
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From Animal Languages to Interspecies Worlds
In 1904, when he was four years old, Hans could solve multiplication and division problems and extract square roots (Allen and Bekoff 1999, 26; Despret 2004). He could spell words and detect intervals in music, and he could discriminate tones and colors. Hans, who was a horse, answered the questions that humans asked him by tapping his right fore-hoof on the ground. Local newspaper articles about Hans and his human, Wilhelm von Osten, drew many humans to the courtyard where he exhibited his talents. Some of them were convinced he was a genius; others thought that he, or rather his human, was a fraud. Von Osten was insulted by the suggestions of fraud, and formed a commission consisting of a veterinarian, a circus manager, a cavalry officer, several schoolteachers, and the director of the Berlin Zoological Garden, to investigate the case. It turned out that Hans could also answer questions correctly in the absence of von Osten, and psychologist Oskar Pfungst was enrolled to solve the mystery. Pfungst soon found that although he could not detect any, Hans was picking up signals, because when the human who asked the question did not know the answer, Hans was also unable to answer. Pfungst continued his investigations, and finally discovered that, without being aware of it, the humans who questioned Hans nodded slightly when he tapped the right number, which allowed Hans to give the correct answer.
Hans was clearly an intelligent horse, but his intelligence lay on a level other than the one investigated: Hans had learned to read movements in the skin and muscle of humans. He also trained the humans he worked with (Despret 2004). By responding to some cues and not to others, he taught humans how to communicate with him. Vinciane Despret (2004) describes this process as a mutual attunement: human and horse learn to read each other through “body language,” some of which is intentional and some of which is not. For Despret, the phenomenon of attunement is a positive research method that can allow scientists to collect data beyond the animal as object of research, seeing and showing the non-human animal in question as subject. Close interaction with other animals thus produces a type of insight not reducible to the classic canons of scientific knowledge-production (Candea 2013). The scientists who investigated Hans did not share Despret’s opinion, and while the public still came in large numbers to watch Hans perform his tricks, scientists in fields such as cognitive and social psychology developed experiments that were double-blind, meaning that neither the experimenter nor the subject knew the condition of the subject or the predicted responses.
Bird scientist Len Howard (1952, 1956) argued against behaviorism, the predominant way of studying birds in her time, both in method and as a theoretical starting point. Howard believed that experiments in laboratories could never give us a real insight into bird behavior, because captivity made them nervous. She also argued against a mechanistic view of birds, and instead saw them as conscious and intelligent individuals. In order to study their behavior in a more natural setting, Howard opened her cottage in Sussex—literally leaving the windows open—to the birds who lived in the area. She fed them and made nesting places for them in and around the house. Great tits, robins, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, finches, and birds of many other species soon learned not to be afraid of her, and began to use the house as they pleased. This allowed Howard to get to know them intimately. In her work, she writes about the relations they had with one another and with her, their behaviors and personalities, which she often wrote down in the form of their biographies. Trained as a musician, she also studied and wrote down their songs. The communication between Howard and the birds was extensive, and included gestures, eye contact, tone of voice, bird songs, and calls, but also human words; the birds usually understood what Howard meant intuitively and otherwise learned fast.
With one of the birds, a female great tit named Star, Howard began an experiment reminiscent of the story of Clever Hans. One morning, instead of giving Star her daily nut, Howard told her to tap for it. Star immediately understood what was required of her and rapped out two taps on the wooden frame of a screen with her beak, copying Howard’s tempo. Howard first taught Star to tap numbers in response to her own taps, and then used spoken numbers. Star learned to count to eight in this manner. Howard could not tap fast enough to get to nine. Star sometimes refused the lessons, holding her head up high, and at other times explicitly asked for them by turning her beak towards the wood, or instigated them herself by tapping. Because of her mathematical insight, and because she understood so well what Howard wanted from her, Howard called her an avian genius.
In the experiment with Hans, von Osten was investigating human intelligence in a horse, which limited Hans’s options to respond. Even if, following Despret (2004), we understand that Hans was intelligent and that attunement makes the production of knowledge possible, Hans’s options for exercising agency were limited. He could not, for example, leave the experiment. Howard was interested in bird intelligence, and shows that it is not necessary to raise other animals or hold them captive in order to gain their trust,1 build a relationship, and conduct a counting experiment.2 Howard describes how two animals of different species connect, get to know each other, and derive joy from a specific kind of communication in the form of a working relationship (see also Hearne [1986] 2007), whereas the story of von Osten and Hans primarily seems to be one of use—or even exploitation. As far as we can tell from their life stories, Howard was genuinely moved by and interested in the birds she shared her house and life with, and vice versa. Star was free to come and go as she pleased; both she and Howard initiated the contact. In her house and garden, Howard let the birds co-shape the terms of interaction. She repeatedly mentions that the birds were quite demanding in terms of attention, food, and interior decoration. She was willing to expand her human world to incorporate their forms of creating meaning, and actively searched for ways to build new common worlds with them using human and bird languages. For her personally this meant retreating from the human world; because the birds were scared of other humans, these had to be kept out of the garden and house as much as possible. The birds and Howard created