Animal Communication – Part One

Do you ever wonder how animals communicate?

Or, how people communicate with animals?

Well, good communication between people and animals is not a natural thing.

“Misunderstanding” our pet’s animal language could cause accidents, as well as a lot of grief for the pet.

First of all, communication with animals is more than your pet using its voice.

Like humans, animals use body language to communicate. Its posture, fur, and odour are some of the ways of communication which animals use more often than any sound they may make.

Because we, as humans, misunderstand this body language, problems can occur.

One example is the “break out” of the gorilla Bokito in a zoo in Holland last year. It was discovered that the woman who was attacked by the animal provoked him to become aggressive, while all the time she thought she had a special connection with the monkey because he was laughing with her.

She did not know that the “smile” in his language was like a declaration of war.

A smile may be contagious, but for a gorilla it could be dangerous, too

Also, more close to home, our own pets are suffering under these kinds of misunderstandings, too.

Many times we hear about a dog biting someone because they are aggressive, or mad. The dog gets all the blame, although the animal bites only because it felt threatened and it does not know any other way of handling the “danger.”

The language of cats is extremely complex.

A cat can purr because she feels good, but also because it is asking for help.  Only by understanding the cat’s body language, can we tell the difference.

With birds it is like this: because a bird is vocal, the owner only listens to its singing. It’s only when Tweety is sitting quietly on the bottom of the cage, does the owner notice that something is very wrong.

However, if the owner would have looked at his feathers, or the tone of the skin, or the pupils of the eyes, he would have recognized the problem much sooner.

I don’t feel good

How can we prevent such misunderstandings?

For the answer, we have to understand just how different animals communicate. Several scientists studied the language of animals.

There are two different starting points. One group says that people are descended from animals and share a lot of similarities in language and communication.

The other group says that we cannot compare the communication systems because animals do not have intelligence and do everything automatically.

Which group is right?

A renowned researcher tried to find out by conducting a seven-year study into the differences between animal and human language.

In next month’s column, we will examine that study and see if we can come up with a logical answer.

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