Some notes on talking animals

From Clever Hans to Bunny the TikTok sheepadoodle.

In one video, Bunny the talking dog appears to look in the mirror and say “Who this?” In another she asks, “Why dog?” (“I don’t know how to answer that,” says her human, understandably.) In a third, most unnervingly of all, she asks: “When no Bunny?” It’s one thing to train a dog to press buttons so she can tell you when she’s hungry, or would like to take a walk. It’s quite another for her to ask you when she is going to die. 

Bunny, a sheepadoodle with millions of social media followers, has been learning to “talk” as part of an experiment conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and can now “say” around 100 words. This is perhaps not that as big an achievement as it may initially sound – she’s using a specially-made soundboard, and “speaks” by pressing the right button rather than actually making a sound herself; and anyone who has worked or lived with an animal knows that they can communicate a great deal without words. But what’s really impressive is that Bunny seems, at times, to put words together to explain more complex ideas. In one of the more compelling videos she types the sentence, such as it is, “Ouch paw stranger” then seems to present her paw. Caught in it, on further inspection, is a thorn.

Bunny is far from the first animal to talk, or the first to be studied by those researching the topic. In the early 20th century, a maths teacher named Wilhelm von Osten seemingly taught his horse, Hans, to understand basic arithmetic. Asked a seemingly complex question like, “If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?” Hans would tap his hoof on the ground 11 times. Given that this required comprehension of both numbers and the human calendar, audiences were amazed. The horse was soon known as der kluge Hans – “Clever Hans” – after a fairy tale.

It was too good to be true, of course. Investigation by trained researchers found that, while it wasn’t a trick, exactly – Hans genuinely could answer questions without von Osten’s involvement – he couldn’t do so if the questioner didn’t know the answer themselves, or wasn’t in his line of sight. He hadn’t learned maths or the days of the week at all: what he had learned, impressive in its own way, was to read human body language, even when people didn’t know they were using any. 

In the century since, there have been numerous attempts to research the potential of animal-human communication in a more structured manner. Most impressive was probably Washoe, a chimpanzee based at Central Washington University, who spent the late 20th century learning as many as 350 words in American Sign Language. (She was considered to know a sign if she could demonstrate the fact by using the signs correctly and spontaneously for 14 consecutive days.) She could ask when dinner was (“Time eat?”), describe where her toys were, and sometimes held tea parties for her dolls, as if she were a human child. On one occasion, unprompted, she pointed to a swan and signed “water bird”. 

The most striking story, though, involves the time when one of her carers took a long absence due to a miscarriage. On her return, finding Washoe sulky at being abandoned, the carer in question decided to be honest about the reason for her absence, and signed the words, “My baby died”. According to the researchers’ write up: 

Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat’s eyes again and carefully signed “CRY”, touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human.

Chimpanzees, the note adds, do not shed tears. 

Good science, though, requires replicable results, and replicating this experiment has been extremely tricky. One attempt, Project Nim, documented in the 2011 film of the same name, involved raising a chimp, “Nim Chimpsky”, in a human household. There his adoptive mother (I’m so sorry about this part) breast fed him. All this went about as well as you might expect: my main memory of the film is that, at one point Nim asked someone to pass him a cat, because he wanted a cuddle. He then tried to have sex with it.

The language learning went little better: eventually Herbert Terrace, the researcher who had initiated the experiment, concluded that Nim was taking cues from researchers and signing simply to get a reward. He no longer believed the chimp could even understand what he was saying, let alone use the signs to express abstract thought.

There is one animal who may, in fact, have been able to do just that. Parrots can mimic human speech as an extension of the way they mimic the sounds made by other birds in the wild. Over thirty years, Alex the African grey – his name was an acronym for avian learning or, possibly language, experiment – was trained to identify 50 different objects by name, and quantities of up to six. He could distinguish seven colours and five shapes, and knew concepts like “bigger” or “smaller”, “same” or “different”. He could identify what category an object belonged to, even if he’d never seen it before – recognising a key, say, even if it was a different size or colour to those with which he was familiar – and on being presented with an apple, an object whose name he didn’t know, he described it as a “banerry”: a portmanteau, it seemed, of two more familiar fruits, “banana” and “cherry”. 

The reason Alex is notable though – the reason he got an obituary in the Economist – is that he is the only animal who is known to have asked an existential question, when he looked at himself in the mirror and asked, “What colour?” I find the idea of a parrot wanting to know what colour he was almost as moving as I do the fact that we know his last words. One evening in 2007, when his trainer, the animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, left the lab for the night, Alex said, as he always did, “You be good, I love you. See you tomorrow.” He died in the night. He was just 31: still young, for a parrot.

This will break your heart, sorry.

How seriously we should take any of this is contested, to say the least. The “Clever Hans” effect still haunts the field, and essentially none of these experiments have proved repeatable (though this is surely in part, at least, because they take literally decades to play out). One linguist, Thomas Seboek, has expressed the view that:

the alleged language experiments with apes divide into three groups: one, outright fraud; two, self-deception; three, those conducted by Terrace. The largest class by far is the middle one.

All of which suggests that, even if Bunny has learned to ask for food or a walk, it’s not clear she can really speak in sentences, let alone ask why she is a dog or contemplate the matter of her own death. Maybe. But having known both cats and dogs, I can see why researchers would convince themselves animals can talk, and why they might even be right. And I can never quite stop thinking about the parrot who just wanted to know what colour he was.

Self-promotion corner

This is an expanded extract from the archive of The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, a newsletter (obviously) sent every Wednesday around 4pm. In this week’s edition II compared the Budget's approach to childcare to its approach to HS2; wrote some notes on the popularity of surnames; and asked, why is north not where we think it is?

If you’re enjoying these weekly extracts from the archive, then why not become a paying supporter? Normally, for just £4 a month or £40 a year, every Wednesday afternoon you’ll get a bit on politics, some diverting links, an article on something from history/geography/language/whatever I’ve been obsessing about this week, and the map of the week… 

…but right now I’m running a special offer in which if you sign up for a year it’s just £38, and you get a copy of my book Conspiracy: A History of Bollocks Theories, and How Not To Fall For Them (co-written with the delightful Tom Phillips)  when it comes out in paperback next month. Click here to get started.

BUT: we’re all broke right now. If you can’t currently justify paying for some nerd’s substack (unemployed, underemployed, impoverished student, and so forth), just hit reply and I’ll give you a complimentary subscription, no questions asked. I am literally giving it away.