Towards the end of 'Chasing Doctor Dolittle', in a section about how he contrived to confuse a trail of ants, Slobodchikoff, author, animal behaviourist and Professor of Biology at North Arizona University, runs through a series of questions that he sometimes asks his students. First he asks who thinks that humans can think. And then who thinks dogs, then cats and finally ants. To the first question every hand every time is raised. To the second usually about two thirds, and then one third and then, finally, in response to the last question, most of the time, he says, not one hand is raised. Now I know very little about animals, except what I have picked up from the occasional David Attenborough documentary, but I think if I was in any of those audiences, well I think I would have raised my hand confidently in response to all four questions. If I could say that I might have not raised my hand for the fourth, I think perhaps I might have found this book to be more revelatory than I did. And I think it does set out to be revelatory.
In 'Chasing Dr DoLittle' the reader is invited to play the role of the eponymous doctor while the author assumes the role of his faithful parrot Polynesia, interpreting for the reader the whistles, grunts, groans and movements of a varied pageant of creatures including prairie dogs, honeybees, ants, lizards, chickadees, ravens, squid, whales, chimps and chickens. And as these creatures run, shuffle, swim and dance across the pages he offers his interpretations with the attention to detail characteristic of someone who loves what they do, and with the succinct and vivid language of a writer who likes his reader. Slobodchikoff, in his approach and in his style of writing, is not unlike Konrad Lorenz, and while he is perhaps never quite as charming or as endearingly surprising as Lorenz (I'm thinking here of 'King Solomon's Ring') he does sometimes, talking to the lizards on his front porch, or avoiding a swarm of angry African bees, come close.
The swarming African bees are terrifying. Their cousins, the everyday honeybees are much more civilised. Dancing circles and figures of eight, they can communicate to their fellow bees the distance to and direction of a nectar source, and can adjust any number of the variables to account for 360 degrees of direction, and for distances of anywhere between 300 feet to several miles. That's about 100,000 'words' for the combination of distance and direction. And Slobodchikoff would argue that they are words, without the inverted commas, in that each variable can be altered to change the meaning of the communication. The type of dance, whether a circle or a figure of eight, a waggle, shuffle or tremble, is, for example, equivalent to a noun, referring to a measure of distance, whereas the angle of the dance serves the purpose of an adjective, indicating direction. In much the same way an ant can alter the chemical make-up of deposited odour packets, as well as the distance between each packet, to communicate the distance, direction and quality of a food source. And the common variety household dog, in its anal secretions, can encode enough information to assemble a reasonably dependable Wikipedia entry.
Prairie dogs on the other hand don't need anal secretions, or Wikipedia to communicate. Their alarm calls are packed with information, about the type of predator in sight for example, whether it be a man, a coyote or a hawk, and about the colour, shape and size of the predator, as well as information about its distance and speed. It is the experiments which explore these calls which take pride of place in this book. In one such experiment three students are sent out into a colony of prairie dogs, each wearing a different coloured shirt, and the resulting calls of the dogs (who are not dogs, but rodents, like squirrels) analysed. Each call is a combination of different frequencies of sound, and in the analysis only one of the frequencies, the one associated with colours, changes. The students are sent out again and again, changing appearance, distance, direction and speed, and the resulting calls analysed. And the conclusion is that prairie dogs seem to have something like a grammar. There are parts of their calls that serve as nouns (human, coyote, hawk), adjectives (yellow, blue, red), verbs (running, walking) and adverbs (quickly, slowly) and, what's more, the parts can be combined in different ways according to shifts in context.
To the same end Slobodchikoff offers the calls of the Carolina chickadee, which are made up of four syllables, arranged into different combinations according to whether the birds are foraging near the ground, or navigating their way through dense woods. When these combinations are played back to the birds in experiment conditions their responses are as they would be out of the laboratory, but when the four syllables are rearranged, artificially reconstructed and played back, the chickadees do not respond, or are confused, as we would be if someone were to rearrange the words in this sentence into a random order.
In other words, if animals can alter the grammar of their communications according to context, then animals, whether dogs, cats or ants, squirrel-like rodents or chickadees, can think. This is the central premise of the book, though not necessarily its most interesting. Of equal interest are the evolved means by which animals have learned to communicate, like the squid who can flash one colour on one side to warn off a rival, while at the same time flashing a different colour on its other side to attract a mate. And then there are the curious rumbles, gurgles and clicks which make up the rhyming songs of the humpback whales, sung for the most part on their journeys to and from breeding grounds.
Of equal interest too, though only briefly discussed, is the idea that animals perceive time differently, from one another and from us. Human speech played at sixteen times slower than normal speed is much like whale song, and sped up eight to ten times is much like birdsong. So although to us a whale's song might sound like a series of grunts and groans, and a bird's song a nonsensical twittering, to a whale and to a bird, who perceive time slower and quicker respectively than we do, each may sound much like a sentence would to us. And perhaps that explains, by way of a hastily cobbled end, why Polynesia was so much smarter than the doctor.
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