Animals, from the perspective of some researchers, have been looked down upon and slighted when considered to be incapable of sophisticated communication and thinking. However, such a belief may only represent our lack of knowledge, though in ancient societies, it was taken as natural that the animal had feelings and thought. Recent research on both prairie dogs, elephants, and killer whales has revealed extensive communication and thinking.

Elephants: On October 18, 1997, National Geographic aired a program on NBC Europe featuring the work of the world's most renowned elephantologist, Cynthia Moss, selected by Robert Leaky to head Kenya's Save the Elephant Program. Moss, who literally lived with elephants in the Anbeselli Sanctuary for over a decade, recorded over 33 elephant vocalizations or sound concepts meaning variously, 'Let's go.' 'Attack.' Baby-to-mother: 'I'm scared.' Mother-to-baby: 'Don't worry. I'm here.' Continuing, she said, "I believe elephants have a range of emotions from joy to grief. And there are even clowns among them. Real clowns."

In uniting behind their leader, many social animals act as one and through their leader speak with one voice. And it is the leader which stipulates the actions of the whole as with elephants where the matriarch decides when to go into a bog to rescue a young elephant that fell in by "stating" who will make a ramp by breaking the bank so the youngster can walk up and who will use their trunks and tusks as shovels to hold the youngster until the ramp is ready, and who will keep the water buffaloes at bay in case they charge the elephants; when to eat the mineral-rich dirt needed to supplement their diet. When to attack a herd of water buffalo contending for the same water hole; when, after crossing a river, to go back to get a youngster crying to them as he was too scared to go into the water; when to lie down and rest in the shade of a grove of trees and when to awaken and go ahead; when and if to adopt a baby elephant abandoned by another herd as its original mother was too old or sick.

Killer whales: Killer whales travel in groupings of families known as pods and can contain upwards of 30 whales per pod which remain together throughout their lives, and each have their own communication systems that largely change about every ten years. They use various hunting methods tailor-made for their different hunting areas where the type of food and terrain differ. NBC Europe aired a National Geographic program on December 27, 1997 documenting the different habits. One pod in Vancouver herds herring. They circle the herring into smaller and smaller circles by swimming around them, keeping in touch with one another through chirps, while driving them to the surface of the water. Once there, they stun larger and larger numbers of them with a slap of their back fin. One bull male can eat 400 a day.

In the Cape of Good Hope, near the Antarctic Circle, the whales use a completely different strategy. They reverse the whole idea of fishing where one stands on dry land and draws fish from the water. "Fishing" from the water, they plop onto the land and drag seals into the water. In the Cape, there are no herring, only seals and penguins. The whale's eyesight is good and when they ride on the surface of the water can spot baby seals on the beach. It takes the whale parents several years to teach the method of beaching where they push their young whale calves onto the beach and teach them how to rock themselves back into the water.

The next few sentences are speculative, but certainly the parents must "say/vocalize" something by manner of instruction before pushing their calves on the beach to let them know that they aren't being abandoned and must swim back. Surely, there must be initial protests, reluctance, "words" of fright from the calves. Assuredly, there must be the equivalent of dialog, conversation, explanation, questions, answers. This is so much like Abraham placing his son Isaac on the altar as an offering, raising the ax and doing everything but bringing it down across his throat.

It must require more coaxing and be more difficult for a whale parent to convince its bulky child to go onto land than a human parent to get its child to go into the water for on occasion the 1,000 pound+ calves do get stuck on the sandy/rocky beaches and die or otherwise struggle to get back into the water. They are learning a life-threatening ploy. Of course, they are driven by sheer hunger and the otherwise threat of starvation. What a hard way to get a meal. We might imagine the first time it was historically done was under circumstances where whales had literally no food. Saw the seal calves on the beach. Realized they would not enter the water. And devised a strategy to ambush them. The whole purpose of the beaching exercise is to land on the beach, snatch a pre-selected seal pup, and rock back into the ocean carrying their meal along. One can imagine how difficult this is as the whale must land such that like an outfielder diving for a ball, he has it in his mitt/mouth, as soon as he touches turf in his surprise landing. This shows them to be thinking animals and it is noted that they communicate frequently and extensively.

On one hand as well, we see the killer whales repeatedly sending seal pups sailing through the water like a well hit tennis ball with a slap of their tail, the commentator saying they were practising for life in the deep sea. However, there is also footage of a killer whale, after having his fill of seals, gently nudging a seal pup perhaps some 100 yards out in the water onto the shore quite unharmed. Actually, it was just as their own parents gently nudge the training baby whales onto the beach to learn how to "stop n' shop," where they nab a juicy seal tidbit for lunch. This time, however, was altruistic.

Altruistic thinking in animals: The so-called killer whales (mis-named?) were doing the same thing their parents did with the same motivation of caring for the weak and defenseless as they were one time themselves. This is quite similar to altruistic elephant behavior towards a different species. After chasing a herd of buffalo away, a buffalo calf was hit by a buffalo and lay unable to rise. The elephants were leaving but several returned and milled helplessly around the little buffalo reluctant to leave it there. The commentator said, "The broken body of the buffalo causes concern and suggests awareness of injury or suffering even among others." The whale and elephant show themselves to be creatures of emotion.

And, consider the blind labrador retriever who heard a girl's terrified scream who jumped into the water to save her from certain death in a strong current taking her out to sea in a program aired on Dateline, NBC Europe. The animal scientist said, "It is an unnatural act for blind animals to dive into the water. It heard the tonality of voice and was alarmed and directed to the girl by the sounds she alone made. The dog was guided back to the shore by listening to the location of its master's voice." As will be mentioned later and is mentioned elsewhere, voice tone as used by the animal, is so very pregnant with meaning and conveys volumes by the user while at the same time revealing volumes to the hearer. Vocal tone as a sound concepts reveals thought, feeling, emotion, plan-of-action as when hearing the snarl of a dog or the purr of a cat. Vocal tone embodies vast ranges of thinking. And, so onto the prairie dog.

Prairie dogs: Constantine Szobachkov in People Magazine (Fall 1997) has investigated prairie dogs for over ten years. He has sent research assistants into prairie dog areas: people of different heights, wearing different colored clothes, with different things: guns, dogs on a leash, empty-handed. The chirp of the prairie dog was analyzed each time and the structure of their communication noted and patterns detected. Szobachkov states:

Just as the human voice wave form has certain structure, so too does that of the prairie dog. They communicate in chirps. One chirp can be made of hundreds of units with 'words' analogous to nouns, others to adjectives. They also have various harmonics in one chirp and change it in ways understood by all. We looked at the wave form from nine different perspectives. They can indicate the difference between a man and a dog. The colors of clothes the person is wearing. How tall they are.

Asked how a prairie dog could reveal the height of a person, Szobachkov remarked that a certain series of lines in the chirp were rounded and denoted height. And when these were altered in a certain manner, it depicted one height from the other. He considers the prairie dog to have a higher vocabulary than any other animal.

Comment: Though speculative, the writer's feeling is that countless animal vocabularies are as complex. For instance, song birds sing as many as 300 notes per second and both whales and elephants have highly vibratory sounds or vocalizations. But, no spectral analysis on their communication (or any other animal communication) has been done as has been done with the prairie dog where sound wave pattern have been produced with the introduction of a class of objects with slight variations in features: e.g. people of different heights, wearing different colored clothes, carrying different items.

We don't know if the whale or elephant produces a particular sound for a given class of things (e.g. lions) but with minor and almost imperceptible modifications for the number of lions, if they are male or female, young or old, visibly in front, behind, or hidden. Bees have a vibratory dance. And though we have always known that it denotes direction, 99.99% of humanity wouldn't know how to interpret the dance if they saw it and the remainder could only interpret it with sophisticated equipment and recordings. But, for its purposes, bee communication is significantly more sophisticated than human where one person tries to tell another how to get from this street to that to find the post office. It is the writer's opinion that all vibratory-based communication systems will prove to contain verbs, nouns, adjectives, and so forth. A simple look at human vocalization can reveal as much. Man emerged from the animal. And even one human vocalization can reveal many things about mood, emotion, and intention such that it is reflective of several of each.

The Japanese company NEC is devising a computer that can translate from and to Japanese and English. Choosing 500 basic words, for those 500 words to be translated by computer from English into Japanese would require 10 million English sounds. But, to translate those same 500 words from Japanese into English would require one billion Japanese sounds. This indicates that the simple tone of voice is pregnant with meaning as the above example shows of the blind dog swimming out to rescue a screaming girl about to drown galvanized into action by the alarming tone of her voice.

While man has developed words to convey meaning, and thus has come to rely less on tone since being so-called civilized, animals still only have vocalizations. And for this reason, animals must have the richness today that human vocalization did when man left the caves and entered civilized society. The point is that if human vocalization is so rich even after 10 million years separation from the animal, it must have been richer then and animal communication must now be as rich as it was then and therefore be full of meaning. Ant chemical markers are likewise full of information though we don't know how, how much, or what a certain chemical means. It would even be prohibitively difficult to collect a sample of ant pheromones.

Conclusion: That animals do not speak Korean, French, or Mandarin should not prejudice us into believing that they do not think. We are well-cautioned that Silence is golden – animals often are. We are instructed that actions speak louder than words: and in acting, animal intention is clearer than words can describe. One picture is worth a thousand words: here again, one view of an hungry, angry, tired animal says more than a thousand words can about their thoughts at that moment. Yet, not only do animals have silence, action, and picture, they also have vocalizations or sound concepts. All four are containers of thought. These points should allow us to keep our minds open concerning the issue of animal intelligence until more research confirms the question either one way or the other.

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Bibliography supplied on request

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