Why can’t animals talk to us?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from cool kids like you about pretty much anything, and we find answers. If you have a question, stick around, and we'll tell you how to send one in at the end of the episode.

We've gotten literally thousands of questions, and many of them are about animals. If we could answer one animal question a day, every day, you'd turn into an adult before we had answered them all.

Melody and I love animals too, so we're always happy to see another animal question come in. And it's not surprising that all of us are so curious about animals. After all, we're animals. But we've evolved so differently from other animals, and there are so many different varieties of animals that we share the planet with. Plus, animals do amazing things. Some fly, others can hop higher than they are tall, lots of them breathe underwater or burrow underground.

But there's one thing we do that no other animal seems to do in quite the same way. I'm six years old, and I live in Brisbane, Australia, and I want to know why animals can't talk. That's Rory. Well, no, that's a hyrax, and I don't know its name. Rory was the human asking the question before we heard the hyrax.

Do you know what a hyrax is? It's a small, brown, furry mammal about the size of a rabbit. Actually, some people think hyraxes look kind of like rabbits, just with no ears or tails. They live in Africa, and while they're not going to say hello to you, they certainly make a lot of noise. But are they talking? We're going to explore that idea today with someone who studies the ways animals communicate.

My name's Eric Kirschenbaum. I'm a zoologist at the University of Cambridge. Do animals have language? And do they communicate? And are those the same thing? Well, they're not the same thing. Communication is not the same as language. All animals communicate, all of them, every single one. Every single animal communicates. It's kind of part of what being an animal is, is to communicate because animals move around, right? That's what makes them different from plants.

So when you move around, you're not always next to the people you started next to. So you could have some way to tell them where you are or where are you. So all animals communicate. You see it in every single creature that you can think of. But you know, a lot of animals communicate using smell. You might not notice that they're communicating.

But they're still communicating. It's not with sound, you know, they haven't got ears, but they can still detect chemicals in the water and they can see what's going on around them through smell. So a lot of simpler animals, yeah, they communicate using smell. So you might not notice it unless they're particularly smelly.

But then the question is, what's language? Is language the same? Is language different? And, you know, a lot of people use them as if it's the same, use those words as if they're the same thing. But they probably shouldn't be because, you know, what humans do, what we do when we speak language, it's really different from what animals do, right? It's a lot more complicated. So it's good to have a special word for what we do, what language is. And then

I suppose the question you're really asking is

Are there any animals who do anything like what we do, who talk anything like the way that we do? That's complicated. You know, the kinds of things we can say. We can say so many things. We can say any. I've already said so many things. I've already said more things than probably all the animals in the world could say if you put them all together. So can any animals do that? And we don't think so. We don't think there's any other animal that can speak like we do.

We asked Eric Kirschenbaum to come on But Why because he just wrote a book called Why Animals Talk, The New Science of Animal Communication. He focuses on animals that communicate by making sound. As he mentioned, some animals communicate by scent or by dance or by changing colors. And even humans communicate in ways other than just language and speech.

Like, I bet that teachers or parents or other adults in your lives can give you a look using just their face, maybe their face in their hands, and you know exactly what they're trying to convey to you without them having to say a word. You probably do it too.

But Eric has been really focusing in on the animals that, like humans, often use sound to get their message across. And he recorded most of the animal sounds you're going to hear in this episode, except for the rattlesnake one. I recorded that. Let's get back to the question Rory asked. And also, we got the same question from Ronan, who's six and lives in Washington. They want to know why humans are the only creatures that can talk.

Well, that's an excellent question and I'm afraid that we don't have a clear answer to that yet. There are plenty of things about animals and humans that we really don't understand. And one of the problems is that language doesn't last. Language doesn't make fossils.

So you can't look and see what kind of language people were speaking a million years ago. We don't know that. We can look at what kind of bones they had, particularly bones in their throat, maybe will tell us something about when people started to speak. But we know very, very little about exactly why.

We've got some good guesses. I don't know whether they're right or not. But one of the things that probably had a big part to play in why humans ended up speaking is that we probably started living in very large groups where there were lots of people living together. Probably because...

people moved out of the jungle into the into the savannah into the grasslands and Getting food was more difficult. You needed to be in large groups to get enough food and

When you live in large groups, you know, you've got to communicate. There's a lot more things that can go wrong. You know, you step on someone's toes or you're sitting in their place. Communication just seems to need to be more complex in larger groups. And so we think that's probably the way that it all started. And why do we think we needed language as humans?

It was probably something to do with the kind of large groups that we lived in. We needed to convey complex information. You know, maybe you want to hunt an animal, you need to cooperate. Maybe you need to share information about how to cooperate. But more likely than that is that it sort of came along with big brains. We probably evolved big brains before we evolved language. And you need big brains...

when you live in a big group of people, right? It's not easy to have lots of friends and some enemies as well. And you're always trying to figure out who's your friend and who's your enemy and who's your friend's enemy. And is your enemy your friend? That kind of stuff is quite complex. You need a big brain for that. So we evolved big brains and then somehow language sort of slipped in there because we had big brains and we could benefit from language. Then it just sort of, it became possible.

Why is sound such an important component of communication? There are other ways, as we've talked about, that animals communicate. Expressions that animals can make with their faces or bodies, different smells, whether it's a chemical or if you're a dog and you pee on things to let other dogs know some things, or visual cues like birds that have beautiful plumage to signal things. But why is sound so important to communication?

A sound has a special ability that those other ways of communicating don't have and that's it goes around things.

So light doesn't go around things. You can hide behind a tree and no one can see you. So if you're standing behind a tree and flashing your colourful feathers, that doesn't help because the other birds can't see you. Smell can go around things, it's true, but smell moves very, very slowly, whereas light and sound really move very quickly. So what's happened is that sound has really evolved to take that position

Role of that that signal that gets there quickly, you know, you want to say something you want them to be understood immediately Like there's a leopard or something like that So it's it's got to be it's got to be fast and it's got to be Understood received and understood by by the people that you're communicating with so it's that ability to go around trees that is really really useful and

Hello, my name is Penelope and I'm seven years old. I live in Charleston, South Carolina and my question is why do animals speak a different language than we do? Hello, my name is Flannery. I'm seven years old. I live in Costa Rica and my question is why do animals make different sounds?

Hello, my name is April and I'm eight years old. I am from Perth in Western Australia. My question is why do animals have their own sounds?

Well, the answer is that simply they have different needs. They don't need to do the things that we need to do. All animals have evolved and adapted to be well-suited to the life they live. What kind of habitat they live in, do they live on the land, do they live underwater, what kind of food do they look for? There are all kinds of different needs that different animals have, and those determine

the characteristics of the animal. So for instance, wolves, they hunt together, they need to be able to communicate, they live together, they live as a pack, so they have a lot of need to communicate to each other. Some animals that don't live in large groups, they have less need to communicate. So they've each evolved a different way of talking depending on what their particular needs are. Now,

Sometimes sound is a really good way to communicate. We think it is. It is. It's generally, it's really a good way to communicate. But in some places sound isn't a great way to communicate. Like if you live in a river, in a fast-flowing river, it's very noisy. The sound of the water rushing around is all very... Animals there won't communicate with sound. No one will be able to hear them. So they have other ways to communicate. So one of the reasons that

Animals have different kinds of sounds. It's because of the kind of environment they live in. In the forest or in the open fields, different sounds work better in different places. A lot of kids want to know, why can't animals talk to us? My name is Max. I'm six years old. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. My question is, why can't animals talk to us? Who says they can't?

You must have pets. I mean, anyone who has a pet knows that they can communicate with their pet. Now, they're not talking like we talk. You're not talking to them about the TV show that you just saw. Or maybe you are, but they don't understand. And they certainly can't tell you what they've been doing all day. But they can talk. They can communicate with you. They can say when it's time to go for a walk or when they're hungry or when they don't want to play at the moment. This is all communication. So...

To say they can't talk to us, they can't talk in our language, they can't have these complex, really detailed conversations, but they can sure talk to us. Several children want to know about how we do that kind of what we might call interspecies communication. Hi, my name is Manny and I'm eight years old and I'm from Melbourne, Australia.

And my question is, why can't animals communicate with other animals? My name is Dylan. I'm eight. I live in New York City. My question is, can different species of animals talk to each other?

Certainly humans can sometimes interact with other animals. Can animals interact with each other from different species? It happens sometimes. It's not very common. Most of the time when animals communicate, they're communicating to other members of their species. Although, you know, there are also warnings perhaps that an angry animal might give you if you get too close. That's between species.

Occasionally, sometimes you get really interesting, complicated communication between species. So for instance, there's a bird in southern Africa called the drongo and it sits on a tree and it listens to the meerkats that are playing underneath and the drongos have learnt what a meerkat alarm call sounds like. So when the meerkats see a predator, an eagle or a snake, they'll make an alarm call and all the meerkats run away and they hide in the holes.

So what the drongo does is sits on the tree and when the meerkat's found some particularly tasty bit of food, the drongo makes a meerkat alarm call and scares all the meerkats and they all run away and the bird comes down and eats the food. So that's a kind of way of animals talking between species, but it doesn't happen very often.

You can think of ways that animals tell us humans sometimes to do something or get away. You mentioned things that our pets might do, but if you've ever lived in rattlesnake territory, for example, you might hear the rattle of a snake who's telling you, do not come any closer. You usually listen when you hear that.

And those are very simple messages. The stay away is a classic one. Loads of animals can say stay away. They can say stay away to animals of their own species. They can say stay away to animals of other species. Coming up, we'll dive more deeply into the ways animals use the sounds they have to communicate with other members of their own species. It's different for every animal, and Eric Kirschenbaum knows about a lot of them.

This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm. Yikes, I would not want to hear that in a dark forest or field at night. That's another call of a hyrax, that furry mammal species we talked about earlier. It was recorded by our guest, Eric Kirschenbaum. Eric is a zoologist who studies the way that animals communicate with each other, and he's answering questions you've sent us on that topic.

Hi, my name is Leland and I'm eight years old. I live in Leverett, Massachusetts and my question is: Why do monkeys say "oo-oo-aa-aa"? Well, when monkeys make those sounds, they're very much like the sounds that other animals make in that they have a small number of meanings.

They mean things like, "This is my territory. Get out of here, right? This is where I live." Or perhaps they may be within a group, depending on how many animals are in the group, there may be one individual that's dominant and really wants to boss the other ones around. So he's showing off how big and strong he is. It's usually a male, but females can do it as well.

Those kinds of messages, if you want to scare someone or intimidate someone, then you use these sounds that like sound angry. They really do. And we perceive them as sounding angry and animals perceive them as sounding angry as well. So a lot of those loud, sharp sounds that you hear, it's often intimidation. That's often what happens. And yeah, in monkeys, that's one of the main things

one of the main purposes of that kind of sound. Now monkeys use lots of other sounds as well. They have alarm calls for different kinds of predators. So they make a different sound when they hear, when they see a snake, for a different sound when they see a leopard. So they make quite a wide range of sounds, but those really loud ones, they're mostly territorial.

Hi, I'm Maya and I'm 10 years old. Hi, I'm Tali and I'm 7 years old. And we live in Montreal, Canada. And we were wondering, since chimpanzees are so close to humans, why can't they speak our language?

Well, that's a fantastic question. It really is. The answers to that are things that we're just starting to discover. So a lot of people are studying chimpanzees, studying other apes as well. Rangitans, for instance. Gibbons. I work with gibbons a little bit more distantly related to us. Interestingly, gibbons make a lot of noise and chimpanzees don't.

Chimpanzees don't make nearly as much noise as some other primates, some other apes and monkeys. So we don't really understand what's going on there, but the guess is, again I'm guessing here, I think that when, before humans evolved, about six million years ago, our ancestors lived in the jungle.

and probably they were quite a lot like chimpanzees. They weren't chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have been evolving for the last six million years just like we have. Back then everyone, all of our ancestors and all of the chimpanzees ancestors were the same species and we all lived together. And then we split into two and one group went off to live in the grasslands and the other group stayed in the forest.

So the group that stayed in the forest went on over six million years to evolve to become chimpanzees. And the group that went down into the grassland evolved to become humans. So that need to speak, that need to have a language, turned up on one of those two branches and not the other one. It turned up down there in the grasslands.

and our ancestors, after they'd split away from the chimpanzee line, then that was when language evolved. So that's probably why chimpanzees don't and won't and don't need to have a language, because the reason that we evolved language came after our two families split apart. Let's talk about birds. My name is Joanne. I'm eight years old, and I live in Perth, Australia.

Why do some birds have the ability to speak and some don't? Hi, my name is Alix. I am 11 years old and I live in Los Angeles, California. My question is, how are some birds able to talk but others cannot talk? My name is Clara and I'm 6 years old. I live in Seattle, Washington. I'm wondering, um...

How can parrots talk but other animals can't? Why do some birds have the ability to speak and some do not? So I guess maybe the first question is, are birds like parrots speaking our language or are they just mimicking or copying the sounds? Well, you've hit on the answer there, really. So the reason that parrots can talk or can copy our sounds is...

is because they copy. They love to copy, right? That seems to be something that parrots do in the wild. Now, it's not something that songbirds do in the wild. Songbirds do not really copy each other. They learn their songs from listening to the songs around them, but once they've got their song, that's their song. They're going to sing their song and no one else's. Parrots don't sing songs,

but they do copy. Now, why they copy, that's a difficult question, but the fact is they do copy, and that's what gives them the ability to learn to speak like us. But then you ask, but do they understand? Is that language, or is it just copy? Well, that's a very controversial question, because it does seem that some parrots can learn English,

not just to copy, but to speak. To speak like us, to speak with us. Not at a very high level, but maybe like a young child would speak. But they can do it and they can understand, and they can understand what words are, and they can understand that putting words in a different order means something different, and combining words to make new things. So they do seem to have that ability. They're really amazing. They're really amazing creatures.

But most of the time when you hear parrots talking, they're just copying. It takes a lot of work to train a parrot to understand what we're saying. That's a big deal. So if I have a treat and I'm telling my dog to sit and my dog can hear that word and maybe a signal that I give with my hand and then my dog will sit because he knows he's going to get a treat or he's going to get a reward. So

I feel like my dog knows the word sit. And a parrot, you might think, could understand the word cracker, for example, if they knew they were going to get a cracker every time they said it, but they just say the word, they don't know what it means. But you're saying some parrots can actually understand what a cracker is, and they're not going to say a whole sentence, but they might be able to understand when they actually want a cracker, not when I'm telling them, say this word and you'll get a treat. They can actually...

think in the language of humans a little bit. That's amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. It is, isn't it? And, you know, most animals, almost all animals, you can teach them to recognize words. What you do with your dog when you say sit and you give a treat, that works on a lot of animals. And some animals that, you know, you might be surprised that it works on insects,

You know, snails. It's a method that works really well for teaching animals to do things. And for teaching animals to understand that a sound is associated with a treat, say. But yeah, what the parrots are doing is different. It's definitely different. And the idea that a parrot could say, "Hmm, I want a cracker. Give me a cracker." That's quite exceptional.

It's not unique. There are other animals that can do that. We think chimpanzees can do it. Dolphins can do it. Maybe elephants can do it. But it's not a large number of animals that can do that.

You mentioned dolphins. Evelyn wants to know... How do we know what dolphins are saying? And how do dolphins know what we're saying? Hi, my name is Evelyn and I'm five years old. Thank you. Bye. Well, dolphins are really smart. This is one thing we can say about them. They are intelligent. And they're so intelligent that they...

They learn things pretty well. I said you can teach most animals, you know, insects and dogs, you can teach them to sit for a treat. Dolphins can do a lot more than that. And one of the things they can do is they can learn to associate different words with different ideas and understand a little bit of the idea about word order.

that if you say bring the ball to the hoop it's different from bring the hoop to the ball so they can understand that and that's a sign that they've that that they are really smart but what are they saying that's a much harder question that's a much much harder question we don't really know why dolphins need to say very much at all

We know that they have names, we know they give themselves names so they can introduce themselves, which is pretty amazing in itself. But it's still, it's only one thing. Dolphins are really hard to study in the wild. You know, they swim really fast, they're underwater. So looking into what dolphins are saying is something that people still doing, still working on. Haven't got a clear answer for that yet, I'm afraid. One day, one day we'll have one.

Are there any other animals that give each other or give themselves names that we know of? Well, there was a recent discovery that elephants probably do. It wouldn't surprise me if there are here and there some. We know there are animals that... It's mostly those animals that live in large groups.

and where it's really important to remember who's who that might have names for each other. And we think that's why dolphins do it, right? Because, you know, when you live in the sea, the sea's a big place. And so you're always going off, I don't know, looking for some fish over here. And then you come back and then your friend's gone off somewhere else. And you're always meeting people, meeting dolphins and then splitting up with them. And so it's good to remember who's who.

So that's probably why they have names. And certainly other animals that are in a similar situation might as well. But it's not easy to prove. It's one of those things that takes a bit of work. Hello, my name is Ella. I'm five years old and I'm from Israel. And my question is, why do wolves howl?

My name is Michael, my age is seven and I live in Toronto, Canada. My question is how do wolves howl? Well, I work a lot with wolves so that's one of my favourite questions. Wolves howl for at least four reasons.

They howl to show their territory, which I think everyone knows. They're howling to say to other wolves, "Stay away, this is our territory."

They howl to keep in touch with other members of their pack. So when you live in a pack, again, like the dolphins, sometimes you go off looking for something to eat and you come back and no one's there. Where have they all gone? They've gone off somewhere else. So you need a way to be able to communicate across long distances and say, I'm here. And then everyone else says, oh, we're over here.

And then you can find each other in these large, they live in very, very large territories sometimes. So you can easily get lost. You need a way to stay together.

Sort of similar thing is when they leave the pack so quite often the young Wolves will leave a pack and and we'll go off and we'll try and start a new pack and that's a way for them to find each other find a mate Start a pack, you know, if you're just walking through the wilderness on your own You're not likely to meet a wolf But if you're howling and the other wolf is howling then you can find each other So there's a sort of three of the ways three of the reasons that wolves howl and

But my favorite reason that wolves howl is just that they enjoy it, right? It's just fun. And this is really, this is a real thing. It's a real scientific thing because when you live in a pack and you have to live in a pack because you can't live on your own, you'd never survive on your own. It's nice to be with your friends.

And it's sort of like an affirmation of the fact that everyone's here, we're all together, we're all okay, and so we're going to howl. We're going to howl to show that we're here and we're happy. And that's lovely. That is just one of the best reasons to howl that I can think of.

So why are we so fascinated by how animals talk if we can't really communicate verbally with most of them? And they can't really communicate verbally with us. And neither one of us knows what the other is saying most of the time. Well, Eric Kirschenbaum says one reason is just because we're human. We want to understand the world. If we didn't want to understand the world, we wouldn't be human. So it's a very good reason to want to do that. But beyond that,

People have wanted to understand what animals are saying ever since they've been people. This idea that we can talk to animals or animals can talk to us is very, very old. So clearly it's something really important to humans. Understanding how animals communicate also helps us make sure we're keeping them healthy and conserving their habitats.

For example, learning more about whale communication has led scientists to think about how to reduce underwater noise in the ocean so whales don't have as much excess sound to compete with when they're trying to communicate across vast distances. And Eric himself is looking at how a species of monkeys called gibbons talk to each other so researchers can get them to expand into new territories.

If you want to do your own research on how animals communicate, you could start by paying attention to the animals around you. If you have a dog or a cat or another pet, see if you can figure out what their barks or meows or grumbles and grunts might mean. Are they trying to get you to feed them? Are they telling a delivery person to stay out of their territory? Are they kind of saying something affectionate like, I love it when you rub my belly like that?

If you live near any wild animals, you can observe them, too. Are birds calling to one another in the morning and evening to know where they all are and to defend their territories? Are they warning their flockmates about an approaching predator? Squirrels are really good animals to observe, too. Take notes and see what you can learn over time. Let us know how it goes.

That's it for this episode. Thanks to Eric Kirschenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge. His new book is called Why Animals Talk, The New Science of Animal Communication.

Now, if you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it. It's easy to do on a smartphone using an app like Voice Memos. Then email the file to questions at butwhykids.org. Be sure to record in a quiet environment, not the car, unless you're intentionally trying to capture some sound because it relates to your question.

But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public and distributed by PRX. Our video producer is Joey Palumbo. Check out our YouTube series, But Why Bites. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. ♪

But Why, a podcast for curious kids, is known for serious answers to silly questions sent in by kids just like you. But did you know that But Why is now a book series?

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