Atlantic: 'Talk to your pet' translator, in foreseeable
Animal Behaviorist: We'll Soon Have Devices That Let Us Talk With Our Pets
We're fast approaching the point, says Con Slobodchikoff, when computers will help to mediate our communications with animals.
MEGAN GARBER JUN 4 2013
We all try to talk with animals, but very few of us do so professionally.
And even fewer are trying to build devices that could allow us to communicate with our pets and farm animals.
Meet one person who is trying to do just that: Con Slobodchikoff, a professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University, and a modern-day Dr. Doolittle. Slobodchikoff is an animal behaviorist and researcher who has devoted his career -- 30 years of it, at any rate -- to the decoding of animal communications. And though Slobodchikoff has studied those signals across different species, he has focused his original research on the communications of the prairie dog. The creatures, he says, talk to each other using "the most sophisticated animal language that has been decoded." The animals have word-like phonemes, combining those into sentence-like calls. They have social chatter. They can distinguish between types of predators that are nearby -- dogs, coyotes, humans -- and seem to have developed warnings that specify the predators' species and size and color.
To arrive at those findings, Slobodchikoff relied on statistical analyses of the alarm calls produced by one particular species, the Gunnison's prairie dog. He cross-referenced the acoustic qualities of the animals' cries with the circumstances in which they were uttered, using the calls' natural contexts as clues to their meanings.
For a detailed (and totally delightful) guide to the prairie dogs' different alarm calls, see this Radiolab interactive. Meanwhile, the video below offers a summary of Slobodchikoff's research and findings.
Interesting 9 min flic with Murica's meerkats certainly portends--given funding--many next stages.
WHY has this taken so L O N G ??
So I think we have the technology now to be able to develop the devices that are, say, the size of a cellphone, that would allow us to talk to our dogs and cats. So the dog says "bark!" and the device analyzes it and says, "I want to eat chicken tonight." Or the cat can say "meow," and it can say, "You haven't cleaned my litterbox recently."
But if we're going to get to that technology, it's going to take some research. And it's probably five to 10 years out. But I think we can get to the point where we can actually communicate back and forth in basic animal languages to dogs, cats, maybe farm animals -- and, who knows, maybe lions and tigers.
Why, then, have we resisted that idea so strongly? Why do we talk about "animal communication," but not "animal language"?
Slobodchikoff: If you talk to most biologists, philosophers, and linguists, they will tell you that we humans are the only ones who are capable of language. And all the other animals are incapable of that -- all they can do is communicate. So we have that kind of bias, generally speaking. It's not an accepted thing to talk about in biological and philosophical and linguistic circles.
So the bias comes from a kind of possessiveness when it comes to language -- the claim that language is a fundamental part of what makes humans, ultimately, human?
Slobodchikoff: Right. I think that, for the most part, there is the thought that we humans have to be really special -- and language is part of what makes us special. Back when I was a graduate student, people used to talk about (at that time, quaintly) "man" as a tool-user -- the only one who was capable of using tools. Well, then we found that lots of animals could make tools, as well. So then the story shifted: humans were the only ones with culture. And then we found that lots of other animals have culture. So then we had language as the only other thing that distinguishes us from other animals. And now we're finding out that lots of other animals have language.
Just another Murican Exceptionalism-grade species delusion.. Thus: another biased-Science delay.
(And if it turns out that Pratchett was right (too), only that was a camel IIRC: maybe we find that pigs Can do tensor analysis; could you still eat a mathematician, then?)