Dr Doolittle was right all along

Some people have such tightly closed minds. It’s such a shame, as the world is so extraordinary, so fascinating, and we know so little of it. How exciting it is to be introduced to new possibilities, wild ideas, oddities and improbabilities – why would anyone close themselves off from all that, unless they were either tired of life or terrified of it?
The argument in question – whether or not animals had feelings, were capable of meaningful communication with other species (ie humans), and whether they had souls – was being waged with an academic, a man in his fifties with a string of Humanities qualifications.
I’m firmly in the ‘yes, of course’ camp. The academic was strongly opposed, and scornful of my woolly female thinking. Animals are animals, he said with blinding logic. He keeps a cat, but regards it as a thing, to be fed, vetted, and otherwise ignored. His children like it, he says.
I asked if he had a garden. A small patio, he said. ‘So you don’t talk to your plants, then,’ I said. He excused himself and went to find a man without wool for brains.
We may be one of the few animals to use complex speech, but there are many creatures who use language – albeit unlike our own – and to say that we are the most intelligent animals on the planet is a moot point. Read Douglas Adams on dolphins – the key bit is right at the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Whales are generally recognised to have brains far larger than ours and to have a language so complex and subtle that we don’t have the first clue how to decode it. As for migrating birds and spawning salmon – see David Attenborough.
What I didn’t know was that octopuses are as smart as your average cat, which if you ask me is pretty damn smart. Your octopus can learn to open jars by watching people do it. They break out of their aquaria in the lab, and can trot across the lab to get into another aquarium full of fish, for lunch. Octopuses board trawlers and open holds to get at the crab catch.
Pigeons are art critics. A trio of Japanese scientists trained pigeons to tell the difference between Picasso and Monet. After a while, the pigeons could spot the difference in style of paintings they’d not seen before, and later the birds could tell other impressionists and cubists from each other. One of the scientists showed that college students with the same training as the pigeons were no better at distinguishing between Van Gogh and Chagall than the bird brains.
The theory that brain size is an indication of intelligence doesn’t always hold up; when you start looking at bird brains the theory falls very flat. Alex and N’kisi, two African grey parrots, seem considerably brighter than the bonobo apes, Kanzi and his family, who are astonishing scientists with their language skills and dexterity. Kanzi (born in 1980) can string together grammatical sentences (using lexigrams - he can’t say the words) and has a vocabulary of about 200 words.
N’kisi the parrot is only six (African Greys have life spans comparable to humans) but his vocab is almost 1,000 words strong. His owner doesn’t reward him for speaking – N’kisi speaks and learns because he likes it. He has a sense of humour, in fact is a bit of a smartarse, taking the mickey out of his owner and other birds. N’kisi holds conversations, some more intelligent than the average cocktail party chatter.
See Rupert Sheldrake’s website for lots more about this fabulous bird, and his older rival Alex – another African Grey who can count, is learning to read, and can not only recognise the difference between wood, plastic, metal etc, but can say so. The big advantage that parrots have over apes is that parrots can speak. So when Alex fancies a banana, he says with perfect diction: ‘Want a banana.’
It is, of course, perfectly possible for humans to learn other creatures’ language, too: humans are almost as good as birds at mimicry. I am no mean speaker of Chicken, and entertain myself hugely by winding up the cockerels round my house in Transylvania. I attempted Seagull last weekend: I ak-ak-ak-aked at a gull sitting on the roof next door. He looked a bit startled, but ak-aked back. Another gull arrived, and I repeated my statement. The two birds looked me, then at each other; one said ‘ak-ak’ and they both flew off. I got the strong impression that I’d been saying something decidedly non-U.
For a species that behaves in so many extraordinarily bone-headed, murderous ways, it is a bit galling for any human to claim that animals are dumb, in any sense of the word.