Is Anyone Listening?

This is a very well written and refreshing book about non-human communication. While a substantial part of the focus is on Dolphins where the author Denise is personally involved, there are many examples and discussions about other animals as well.

We are learning more about non-human communication. As Denise says, for long we have evaluated animals against human communication standards, based on our belief of human exceptionalism. Our communication features requirements include - time displacement (ability to talk about the past, present & future), abstract idea transmission, combinatorial signals (recombinant parts of sound to form words), recursiveness (phrases within phrases) and others. Instead, we need a different standard for animal communication evaluation – animals have been far more aware and complex in their communications than we have been willing to give them credit for. Why is the ability to understand animals important? Denise quotes the philosopher Arne Naess who said "Nature has a right to exist for itself". We have shamelessly disavowed animals their rights.

There are excellent examples of how animals behave and communicate, as also understand and reach out to other species besides their own. Denise has many experiences with Dolphins – she was surprised when she was able to guide them to a boat to be photographed. Dolphins have been known to work with fishermen to catch fish. There are many others who have worked with different animals since many years. Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey’s work confirmed that chimps & gorillas are intelligent social animals. Cynthia Moss spent decades with elephants who use low frequency sounds for communication. Elephants in Sri Lanka became restive before the Tsunami struck, leading people up the hills. Dolphin whistles encode a good amount of detail, and especially useful for it as sound travels faster in water. There are also dialects to dolphin and many other animal communications. Monkeys can make predator specific calls, so can some other birds and animals who many times use complex loaded signals. Many animals can guess human intent based on our gaze. Animals have the ability to understand other species’ languages over time, though they communicate in their own way.

New technology is accelerating progress. I was surprised to learn that Neural networks and Machine Learning have been in use to study animal communication since quite long, though limited due to comparatively smaller data sets. There are many other challenges such as the need to isolate sound to individuals, correlate it to situations & behaviours. It is still unclear if animals use languages with grammar rules, but we might soon know.

The key is to treat animals as individuals deserving of respect & love, rather than objects or tools for humans. They deserve at least some of their habitat being left to them. For instance, Dolphins travel 10-20 miles in a day, have large network of friends and family, and teach young dolphins how to survive. They hence belong in the wild or need sanctuaries and it is cruel to isolate them for human gawking.

This is a well-researched and compassionate book which I much recommend. It is packed with interesting facts, learnings from research and the work being done.

Entertaining and approachable, this book focuses on just one part of animal behavior and shines a light on an aspect that hasn’t been well understood. Not for lack of trying but because we didn’t have the means to prove many of the theories. In a few short years, we have obtained the resources to study this in depth and Herzing shows how modern technology such as AI has changed his work. He has been working with wild dolphins for decades, and it is clear how much he loves and respects every one of them. The language is always clear and easy to understand, and the author uses examples from other animals to illustrate the similarities and differences amongst the ways we all communicate. The huge leaps in technology lately makes the author optimistic as to what’s to come and he shares this enthusiasm with his subjects and the readers.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/University of Chicago Press.