J. Davidson - Planet Word

Animals with allegedly extraordinary communication skills have been doing good box office for hundreds of years. Signor Capelli’s musical cats were billed in 1829 as ‘the greatest wonder in England’, and Charles Dickens is said to have watched another of his acts, Munito the Wonder Poodle, who could play dominoes, recognize colours and count. Dickens wrote of seeing the act for the first time and being fooled by the dog’s ‘answering questions, telling the hour of the day, the day of the week or date of the month, and picking out any cards called for from a pack spread on the ground’.

‘Toby the Sapient Pig’ was introduced to London audiences around 1817 as ‘the greatest curiosity of the present day’. According to the billboards, Toby would ‘spell and read, play at cards, tell any person what o’clock it is to a minute by their own watch … and what is more astonishing he will discover a person’s thoughts’.

Needless to say, most of these acts were based on trickery rather than genuine language ability. Dickens watched Munito’s performance more carefully a second time and this time he noticed that the dog was choosing cards by smell rather than by sight — the master had daubed them with aniseed.

We’re just as intrigued by the possibility of talking animals today. Type in ‘Talking animals’ on the YouTube website and you’ll be overwhelmed by an astonishing array of video clips of talking pets, like Odie the Pug dog, who yowl-whispers a most convincing ‘I love you’ on command. But away from the trickery and the mimicry and the fabrication, serious scientific attempts have been made to explore to what extent animals have the ability to learn and understand human language.

Dolphins, horses, parrots and chimpanzees have all been the subject of scientific research and debate. Oprah Winfrey’s television show in the USA recently broadcast an interview with Kanzi, a bonobo chimp. Kanzi is known as ‘the ape who has conversations with humans’. The debate is a heated one. Linguists like Noam Chomsky argue that language is unique to humans, whose brains evolved with special language modifications which no other animal has. According to Chomsky, humans possess a sort of language gene which enables them to give grammatical order to words. Others suggest that, if earlier hominids had facilities for communication, then these adaptations may still be present in the modern ape. Yet another group of researchers argues that some intelligent animals have the ability to learn some of the fundamental characteristics of human language.

The earliest talking animal story to generate serious scientific research was probably Hans the Counting Horse. His owner, a late nineteenth-century German maths teacher called Wilhelm von Osten, believed that animals were much more intelligent than humans gave them credit for. Von Osten decided to prove his theory by teaching mathematics to a cat, a bear and a horse. The cat and the bear were indifferent, but the horse, an Arab stallion called Hans, showed promise. If Von Osten chalked a number on a blackboard, Hans would use his hoof to tap the number out — a chalked number 4 would produce four taps of the hoof. Questions on addition, subtraction, fractions and spelling could all be answered by Hans with the tapping of his hoof. Word of the clever horse spread, and Von Osten began to exhibit Hans in free shows all over Germany. Huge crowds gathered to watch Hans answer questions posed by his master. ‘What is the square root of nine?’ ‘If the fifth day of the month falls on a Monday, what is the date of the following Thursday?’ Hans would be asked to spell out words with taps — one tap for A, two taps for B, and so on. His answers were almost 90 per cent correct.

The German board of education assembled a panel of experts to study this equine genius, and in 1904 the Hans Commission, which included two zoologists, a psychologist and a circus manager, reported that it could find no signs of trickery and that Hans’ abilities appeared to be genuine.

The investigation was passed on to a psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, who after careful observation came up with a ground-breaking conclusion. Hans the Horse only gave the correct answer when he could see the questioner and the questioner knew what the answer was. Pfungst had watched Von Osten closely and noticed that as the horse’s taps approached the correct answer, von Osten’s body posture and facial expressions changed. They became tenser, and then relaxed when the horse made the final, correct tap. This relaxing was the cue to Hans to stop his hoof tapping. Thus Hans the horse was shown to be an animal not so much of great intelligence but rather one of great sensitivity to body language. An animal instinct, in fact. Oskar Pfungst’s insight came to be known as the Clever Hans Effect — the influence a questioner’s cues may exert on their subject, both human and animal.

Project Pigeon during the Second World War was an attempt by American behaviourist B. F. Skinner to develop a pigeon-guided missile. A lens which could reflect an image of the target on a screen was put in the nose of a bomb; a pigeon trained to recognize the target was placed inside the bomb as well and would peck the screen whenever the missile went off target. Project Pigeon never got off the ground, as pigeon pecking was overshadowed by the development of electronic guidance systems.

It was just one of the many projects Skinner developed as part of his belief that all animals can learn and change behaviour and that language is simply an extension of learned behaviour. His best-known invention was the Skinner Box — or the operant conditioning chamber. The box contained one or more levers which an animal could press and one or more places from which food could be dispensed. Skinner would put a rat or a pigeon into the box and showed that the animals quickly learned that they would get food every time they pressed the lever. Skinner asserted that they would only manipulate the lever if they were rewarded for the action, a process he called ‘shaping’. He expanded his theory to conclude that human behaviour, including language, is learned from our environment. There is no difference between the learning that takes place in humans and that of other animals. If Skinner was right, and language is learned and not instinctive, then every animal with intelligence of a certain level should be able to learn to talk and can be nurtured to use language.

Dolphins have long been recognized as one of the smartest of all the mammals, with their own highly evolved system of communication of clicks and whistles. In the 1960s, American scientists began to study the complex brain of dolphins and analyse how they communicated with each other and, what’s more, whether we could communicate with them. It wasn’t long before the US military got interested. Imagine an intelligent animal, able to understand and follow instructions, swimming undetected through enemy waters.