I've always found this very interesting, especially their seemingly built-in vocabulary. It's definitely not news though as the blog suggests. I remember having heard about this for years. Here's a reference from 2005: http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/lds/meridian/2005/prairi....
I really didn't expect to read a conclusion like this in an article about prairie dog linguistic research:
This article has summarized groundbreaking research that reveals sophisticated language use by the prairie dog. Their ability to coin new words has thus far defied reasonable explanation. To us it indicates that a divine Creator was required to endow these rodents with this language gift. Surely, even a higher level of design and intelligence would be required to enable the incredibly more complex linguistic abilities of mankind as spiritual children of the Living God.
Well, to be fair, there's a fair amount of goofy Biblical quoting at the beginning. Really, that article is hilarious, you should read it. Complete with pseudo-information theory bullshit -- it's INCREDIBLY COMPLEX, says the title of one section--, artificial intelligence from the sixties (I guess if SHRDLU couldn't do it, then GOD must have done it), and just general obtuseness from a pair of pompous fundamentalists. Come on, the conclusion of this religious tract disguised as scientific paper is, literally, "we don't know why this happens, so GODDIDIT"! Got to laugh at that :)
Were the authors catholics, they'd be either hypothesizing the existence of a Prairie Dog Jesus, or contemplating whether to send missionaries. I can't decide on what would be funnier.
It'd be nice to blockquote this. I can scroll much slower than I can read, or I can scroll much faster than I can read, but I can't scroll at a pace approximating my reading speed.
I also remember reading an old article from around 2000 about prairie dog language. It wasn't as hokey as the article linked above though.
I remember something about researchers realizing the dogs had a vocabulary when they would bark differently based on wether a person or a bird of prey was near.
Off-topic, but if you manage a content site, and you cannot say with a straight face that your mobile site is objectively better for mobile devices in some way, GET RID OF THE MOBILE SITE.
Some years ago, I read about chickadees (small birds found in parts of the U.S. and Canada) having a similar alarm system (1) -- certain types of calls for certain types of predators (e.g., hawks, cats, or owls) and additional modifications based on the perceived threat (including lengthening the call for more dangerous animals).
One of the most interesting aspects of these calls is the "mobbing" signal, which is used to call other chickadees and even other bird species.
The birds are quite endearing; they have a small black cap on a white head and two easily recognizable calls -- the "chicka-dee-dee-dee" alarm call and a sad-sounding, two- or three-note call (2). If you live in the northeast U.S. and set up a bird feeder during the winter, you'll probably get them to visit.
Animals do not have language in the same way that humans do. Yes, the may have a way to communicate with each other by sounding their voices in different pitches, and yes, some apes can learn sign language, but that does not mean that they understand language in the way humans do. Human language has grammar, syntax, and recursion in a way that animals do not.
That sounds like it could be generalized to [noun] [adjective] [adjective]. Notice the lack of verbs, prepositions, or markers for subordinate clauses.
This seems much closer to a code than an actual language.
funny, a friend of mine has been just a few days ago to the vienna zoo and told me she spent 40 mins in front of the prairie dogs claiming they're talking to humans and also posing for photos and laughing at some people.
i didn't know what to say, so i just laughed, now i have to tell her that link ...
Incredible. I owe several degu which are very similar to praire dogs (both rodents, both are highly social, both live in prairies etc). They produce a large number of sounds, and I always thought that their sounds are just are a bunch of noise. Now, I understand, after heard prairie dog's sound that it's not so simple.
Does this use an academic meaning of the term "language" I don't know about? It sounds like prairie dogs effectively have words, but there's no indication that they use grammar, syntax, etc., so describing their vocalizations as "language" seems misleading.
The more we learn about animals, the more I wonder about our casual treatment of them.
It's led me to the conclusion that there are certainly species at least on our level of cognitive development, they just might have different value systems such that our pursuit of technology seems very foreign and strange.
It's also why I'm transitioning into vegetarianism (though still eating chicken eggs, which I can't find an ethical issue with).
I became vegetarian many years ago for precisely this reason. Ordinarily I don't get preachy about it, and tell people that it's just an individual choice of mine. But in truth, the concept of eating meat really does bother me, and I think it bothers a lot of other people.
Other carnivorous animals are rarely aware of the fact that they are using other sentient beings for food (although sometimes they do demonstrate an awareness of this), but we can't help but be aware of it. We justify it with a values system which says that it is morally permissible to eat creatures that aren't as smart or are otherwise just different from us. But that's a tenuous sort of morality, and I honestly think that it gnaws at us more than we usually admit.
Think about how aliens are typically portrayed in science fiction films. They've crossed unimaginable light-years to come to earth, and are immensely smarter than us. But nine times out of ten, once they get here, they've got nothing better to do than kill and more often than not eat us. Same goes for superior machine consciousness: in our mythologies, it almost always wants to kill and/or consume us. Why?
I think it's a reflection of our own insecurities: if there's any species out there that's truly smarter than us, we'd better hope that it doesn't share our value system -- because if it does, then it will see us as entirely legitimate to farm and eat.
So I choose to do unto other species as I'd like other species to do unto me. But of course that's just my personal choice.
If you use anything made with/from animal labor or products, you are practicing the same form of morality, you've just changed what's acceptable from "murdering" to "enslaving", "robbing", etc.
It is also no more tenuous than arbitrarily drawing the line at bugs or bacteria. Thousands of innocent insects had to die to bring us a banana (--death from pesticides, from mechanical crushing during harvest, from geting squashed on the windscreen of the delivery trucks).
It's not arbitrary to draw the line there, although it may be hard to argue for making it a line.
I eat meat, but I do feel it would be more ethically right to avoid it. In the same manner, it would probably be more ethically right to not buy/drive a car, not use cell phones (conflict minerals), give more to charity etc. (So where do you draw the line at how much of your own money you get to keep for yourself?) Something can be ethically bad even if we do not draw a line in the sand (or, even if we do not as a society deprive someone of the freedom to do those bad things).
If I were a vegetarian, and drew the line at eggs or whatever, I would be drawing the line because a line would make it possible and practical to live as a vegetarian. (Similarly, the law has to draw a line somewhere.) Nature doesn't draw the sharp lines that our human languages do, but that doesn't mean we can't rank actions in terms of more or less ethical, it just means it's hard work.
A lot of ethicists draw the line at either sentience (not sapience) or the ability to suffer, usually defined as the presence of a central nervous system. Bacteria fails to pass these tests.
I've always heard "sentience" defined, especially in contrast to sapience, as the ability to simply perceive one's environment. You may be using it under a broader sense, though, because bacteria can undoubtedly sense and react to their environments, and even communicate information to other nearby bacteria. It's a pretty fascinating area.
Here's a summary of a paper in Nature about Bacterial perception:
Better still is the communication, one example is quorum sensing. Bacteria sometimes take little polls before acting, like little mobs trying to rile each other up:
To the bigger point, putting an ethical line in here somewhere always struck me as a bit of a sorites paradox, the endpoints are fairly easy (don't torture humans, don't worry about bacteria), but there's no obvious line in the middle where you couldn't make an argument to include or exclude just one more species, especially when you confront the staggering biodiversity out there, and start to see everything as more of a spectrum and less discrete.
I avoid smarter animals, like pigs, squid, and octopi (dogs, cats, monkeys, or ravens if they ever came up). Cows and chickens are fair game. This is basically arbitrary, but I don't believe it's any more or less tenuous than anyone else's system, we're all making a call with limited information. (As Thomas Nagel put it, no amount of human thinking reveals what it is like to live as a bat.)
Sure, those are traits we use to distinguish different rights among sentient (but not sapient) animals--but it's all rather arbitrary.
How do we define "suffering"? Is it the same emotional experiences we call "fear" and "sadness", i.e., the ability to have the concept "I am afraid/sad"? That means the animal needs to at least have a primitive form of understanding and introspection to qualify (e.g., great apes, chimps, bonobos).
If we go to the other extreme, we must admit we don't have a reliable method for communicating with animals (famous "dog whisperers" aside). We can only infer "suffering" is taking place when the animal reacts negatively to a negative external stimulus. But bacteria respond negatively to a negative external stimulus as well. Sure, there's mind-bogglingly more complexity in a mammalian brain than a bacterium, but if we reduce "suffering" to the observation of a negative reaction to a negative external stimulus, we must say even single cell organisms are "suffering."
Hopefully the aliens will forgive us if we seem barbaric ;)
Part of my experience is a recent trip to India to see some historic sites. While there, it was just easier to eat at vegetarian restaurants, and it was remarkable how much healthier I felt. It will certainly involve some work because I grew up in the West and we simply don't have this sort of culture ingrained, but all great things take some work.
I guess what I found out is that we have a choice: we don't have to eat meat and we can still maintain and even improve our health. That was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak...
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
Indeed! Though I guess what I'm describing about my own transition is me applying what I once limited to primates, cetaceans, large mammals and certain bird species to all animals.
I guess when I was younger, I was able to justify it on the basis of what I concluded to be those species capable of "higher-order" thinking, when it's very apparent we're not sure if there's even that line to be drawn.
Despite the commonly-held belief that eating eggs is an ethical alternative to meat, nothing could be farther from the truth. The stress of being treated as egg-laying machines causes hens to peck at themselves and others, ripping out feathers and eyes, a behavior that is unheard of in chickens raised outside of captivity. To prevent injury, most hens have their beaks are sliced off by a hot blade and without anesthetic. After laying about 300 eggs, her bones leached of calcium and often unable to walk, an egg-laying hen is killed for her flesh just a year after she is born.
For the more than 100 million male chicks every year, the day they hatch will be the last day of their lives. Unable to lay eggs and too small be sold as broiler chickens, male chicks have no commercial value and are gassed or ground alive at just one day old. Tragically this is a reality across all egg production; cage free or “humane” eggs are no different. The killing of male chicks and eventual slaughter of “spent” hens are standard industry practice and can only be avoided by rejecting eggs entirely.
There are plenty of free-range farms with good conditions (at least in the country I live in), and you're exaggerating in an attempt to equate all eggs with factory production (the conditions of which truly are appalling).
The stress of being treated as egg-laying machines causes hens to peck at themselves and others, ripping out feathers and eyes, a behavior that is unheard of in chickens raised outside of captivity.
Hens peck at each other to establish primacy in the wild, or in non-factory conditions very like the wild, losing feathers etc. Animal violence is not down to the conditions humans hold them in. Hence the phrase 'pecking order' which originated far before factory farming of chickens. Violence is probably worse in factory conditions and I'm sure some hens will simply go insane given the conditions you describe, but they do naturally peck at each other to establish dominance.
The killing of male chicks and eventual slaughter of “spent” hens are standard industry practice and can only be avoided by rejecting eggs entirely.
They are only standard industry practice in factory farms. On small free range farms or private holdings of chickens, these practices often don't hold. Note that most chickens won't survive in the wild though, so if they are released, they quickly die from predation.
Whether a vegetarian should eat the young of another species harvested before birth is another question (I can see arguments either way), but factory farming is not the only way to harvest eggs and not all eggs are produced that way.
They have access to a rather large chicken run and often have complete free range through our large lot (& sometimes the neighbors...). My kids were just watching a hen follow a robin around, waiting for it to get a worm out of the lawn, so the hen could rush in and steal it.
The hens peck each other, often viciously drawing blood.
We've continued feeding hens after they've largely stopped laying.
We got mixed runs of chicks, and when the males started crowing, they were freed on a neighbor's farm to live out the rest of their natural lives. (Neighbors liked the idea of chickens, but not roosters crowing...)
So, I imagine we're enslaving the hens and abandoning the roosters, as well as consuming their unborn offspring.
I don't mean to belittle your important message, but I'm quite sure the vast majority of this does not apply to my neighbors who have 4 hens as approved of by our city's law allowing backyard urban hens. In this context, the hens live in a modest backyard free-but-small-range area. It is becoming quite a lot more popular to do this and we've thought of doing it ourselves.
I think the problem is with brutal mass-production agriculture rather than with eggs per se.
Maybe some of us have friends with chickens who get to run around pretty much as they like. Not everyone buys factory farmed eggs. But thanks for playing.
Your friends most likely got their chicks from a hatchery that culls male chicks. It's not just factory farming that's an issue, the entire agricultural industry has serious issues.
I suspect that we have a very minor advantage that allows us accumulate knowledge across generations better than other species. This is not necessarily an advantage in intelligence. An interesting question is, if we took newborn humans and let them grow up in the wild (somehow assure there survival without contaminating the experiment), would there apparent behavior and intelligence be distinguishable from other animals.
Such an experiment would be unethical (for obvious reasons), but many cases have happened "outside the lab" over the years, and when found the people are observed after the fact. There have been many cases where "stray humans" have been taken in and raised by wolves, dogs, or monkeys, and they do take on characteristics and behavior from the environments they grew up in, rather than what we would call normal. A good starting point for reading would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
I personally would be interested in the opposite experiment - taking a newborn animal, and raising it as a human surrounded by humans and human culture, as much as possible, and observing its acclimation (or lack thereof). I couldn't really answer the question of ethics in this direction, but if it were feasible I think an experiment like that would be very eye-opening into the outer limits of other species' intelligence.
This has quite obviously been tried before. See Koko the gorilla. Yes, she was able to understand quite a few signs (1000+), but the idea that they have the capability to be anything close to human is clearly not true.
Humans need to be taught by other humans in order to become human. However, there are tribes of people still living as primitively as possible (i.e. before metallurgy) and the answer seems to be yes - they build houses, make weapons, develop hunting techniques, have religion and use a complex language with which to describe all that to the next generation.
