Jon Bastian
The Word Whisperer
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The other evening, while I was walking my dog, the neighborhood crows were engaging in their usual near-sunset activities, which mostly involve wheeling around the sky, landing en masse on the power lines, cawing loudly at each other, then wheeling around again, going from tree to tree as if they're all trying to come to an agreement as to which motel to check into for the night.
This particular evening, a good sized murder had settled around one tree, more or less, but various birds kept swooping in and out or going from branch to branch. The thing is, because of their positions and because I started to pay attention, something struck me.
Their calls were absolutely not at random. I'd hear one crow squawk a particular note a certain number of times, then another crow answer with a different note and number, and so on, and each crow always gave the same signal. Also, the shorter calls seemed to come from more mobile birds, while the longest calls came from the same places.
It suddenly dawned on me that this was a family gathering in which each member was either announcing their presence by saying their name or asking if a particular other crow was present by saying their name. It surprised me how completely distinct each call was. Every bird had their own unique note and register and tone of voice, right down to the point that birds with the same number of notes still sounded like individuals. And I don't think I'm crazy when I say that the two or three birds with the longest calls really sounded like they were squawking with absolute authority.
This is very different than what you hear when the flock is sending out a warning of a predator in the area, or when they discover a member of the family that has been killed by one. In that case, the birds are generally wheeling around in the air, and their caws are more frantic, overlapping, and agitated. Similarly, if a rival flock tries to come into the area, you'll hear something akin to the predator warning, although in this case the flock will stand its ground, since it's protecting territory, and may be a bit less frantic and user shorter calls in a lower pitch.
The thing is, dinosaurs never died out. They just evolved into birds. And the corvids, as in crows and ravens and the like, are among the smartest of all birds. They can remember faces and actions. Pro-tip: Never do anything to threaten or annoy a crow, because they will just tell the other crows, and they will gang up on you ever after. On the other hand, if you leave them food, they may bring you shiny trinkets.
Even more remarkable, they can use tools, and figure out problems, like this crow.
At first, this may not seem that amazing, since the crow was taught each of the stages of this puzzle separately, but the key detail is that he was never taught how they all fit together to get the reward. That was the part he had to figure out, showing that these birds are indeed able to think logically and consider the future implications of present actions — "If I do A, then I'll be able to do B," and so on.
They have a lot of other superpowers, which are worth reading up on. One of the most amazing, though, is that in Japan, they learned the meaning of traffic lights and began exploiting cars to crack walnuts for them. Watch.
As David Attenborough explains the above, the crows figured out that they could drop a nut in the street while cars were going along it and the tires would crack the shells. Then, when the light changed and stopped traffic, the crows could simply trot into the crosswalk and grab their treat.
There happen to be a huge number of crows in my neighborhood, and I love it. They are majestic and intelligent, they clean up road kill and other crap, and it's amusing to watch when two or three of them will casually try to intimidate a lone squirrel into revealing where she's just buried her goodies. (But don't get me wrong. I love squirrels, too.)
Near sunset seems to be congregation time for the flocks, and it's always the same process. They will arrive en masse, starting out by landing on the overhead wires and striking up a conversation, albeit a noisy and overlapping one. Then, as if one of them fired an invisible starter's gun, they'll take off, soar around a bit, then come back to settle into one or two trees. This is when they begin their alternating individual calls.
I sometimes wish that it were legal to have pet crows, but, sadly, it's been banned by Federal Law without a special permit since 1918. In case you're wondering how Frank Capra got away with it, he didn't. Although legend has it that he owned Jimmy the Crow, who appeared in all of his movies from It's a Wonderful Life on, that bird was actually a raven, and he was owned by animal trainer Curley Twiford, who presumably had the right permits.
(EDIT: Hat-tip to Kaeli at Corvid Research, whose article I linked above, for pointing out that corvids were not banned under the migratory birds act until the early 1970s, and people did keep them as pets during the Depression, although as far as I know, Jimmy still wasn't actually Capra's pet, just another hired actor.)
Finally, there's the famous riddle from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which itself was really Lewis Carroll's clapback at "modern" math of the day. Since he was also a mathematician, albeit a very conservative one, he took great umbrage at new innovations, like imaginary numbers, set theory, alternate geometries, and the like, and used his fictional works to satirize them. Or, in other words, he was kind of close-minded, although also a brilliant writer who managed to give us such endearing and enduring works as the Alice books, including the Jabberwocky poem contained in one of them, and the amazing stand-alone epic The Hunting of the Snark. By the way, Jabberwocky was the inspiration for the very weirdly wonderful early feature film of the same name directed by Terry Gilliam.
But I do digress. Here is Carroll's riddle: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" He intended it to be complete nonsense and, in fact, when he finally got tired of fans asking him about it, he provided his own answer, which really is rather inadequate: "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!" Unfortunately, the pun in the intentional misspelling of "nevar" ("raven" backwards) was "fixed" by a proofreader before this went into later editions, eliminating whatever bit of weak and pedantic humor was in Carroll's original.
The "real" and much better answer, though, should be obvious. It's because Poe wrote on both of them. Well, duh. And even though Carroll was British and Poe was American, the former should have heard of the latter, since Poe died when Carroll was only seventeen and managed to become somewhat well-known in his brief fortyish years. Carroll in particular should have known of Poe's most famous work, The Raven, which is an absolute piece of music written in words. The rhyme schemes in it, both external and internal, are sheer art and brilliance, and the rhythm and intentional repetition absolutely create a mood and a forward motion that is inevitable.
But… none of this has anything to do with telling a hawk from a handsaw, by the way, unless Carroll was intentionally homaging Shakespeare with his poorly attempted riddle.
Here's the point of all the crowing I'm doing, though. If you think that animals are not intelligent creatures with real emotional needs and wants, then you're probably a little less than human yourself. Moving away from birds, I want to close with this absolutely delightful video that's worth the time.
After watching those cows physically expressing joy at being let into the field after a long winter in the barn, I dare you to tell me that they are not thinking, feeling creatures.
Image source: Akshay Vijay Nachankar, used unaltered via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Author joncbastianPosted on 5 June, 2019 6 June, 2019 Categories BlogTags animals, cows, crows, Earth, intelligence, Learning, party, science, television3 Comments on Something to crow about
Dog talk
I've noticed a really interesting phenomenon with two of the three dogs I've owned as an adult. Well, technically one-and-a-half, because the first one, Daisy, started out as the family dog that we adopted after the first dog died. Basically, we started out together when I was still doing the whole K-12 thing and lived with my parents when I went to college.
But although she was supposed to have been my mom's dog, Daisy was having none of that. She decided that I was her human almost from the beginning — we adopted her at 12 weeks old — and when I finally moved out on my own after college and as soon as I was able to, she moved in with me and then never left. She was probably the most intelligent dog I've ever met, and also one of the most easy-going. She loved people and other dogs, and yet somehow always managed to be the boss dog in any pack. The first place I moved her to, there was a Rottweiler mix that started as a puppy but who grew into a giant of a dog that could stand on her hind legs and look me in the eyes, and I'm 6'2". Didn't matter. That dog, Toad (my former roommate has an odd but wonderful sense of humor) totally deferred to Daisy in everything, and all it took was a look from my dog. She never bared her teeth or made threats or anything. It was amazing to watch.
This carried on later when I lived in a house with two other guys and four other dogs, all of which were much bigger. Daisy weighed about 30 pounds, while the other dogs each weighed at least 90. That didn't matter. It was a house rule, at least among the dogs, that none of them were allowed in "my" room, even if I tried to beg and coax them in. I remember one particular night when the roomies were both out of town and it was storming something fierce. I'd let one of the dogs, Sarah (an Irish Wolfhound, so you know the scale) into the backyard because she gave me that "Gotta pee" look. But when she was done, I decided to let her in via my room, which had a sliding door that opened onto the yard, rather than through the kitchen. So I opened it, called her in, and despite the downpour and sad look on her face, she really, really didn't want to.
And what was Daisy doing? Just sitting on the bed, looking calm and harmless. I finally managed to get Sarah to come in, but she slinked so low to the ground and dashed through so fast, that the message was obvious:
"SorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorryokayImout."
And Daisy just stayed on my (ahemn — her) bed, doing nothing.
I never really did figure out how she had this super power, although I did see one crack in it at a New Year's Day party held by a playwright friend of mine. Her theory was that since we could never really know the exact birth dates of our dogs unless they came from a breeder (hint: they never should) then we might as well just peg it to the start of the year and go from there. So everyone was invited to bring their dog.
All well and good, Daisy gets along with dogs, but then a party guest who had snorfed a little too much herbal refreshment started giving Milk Bones to my dog and the hostess' dog, Hank, who was a pretty hefty yellow Lab mix. Well, the inevitable happened. She tossed one too close between them, Daisy went to grab it, and Hank decided to put her head in his mouth. It was more of a warning than an attack, but she ducked and fled, and when she came back to me — and it was very clear that she was in "Daddy, daddy, help" mode — I was able to pick her up like she was a Kleenex. She'd gone so limp in fear that she really seemed to weigh nothing. There was a tiny nick on her head that was bleeding, and it was the one and only moment I ever got to see her lose her mojo.
Flash forward to current dog, who has a lot in common with Daisy, but a brief side trip through dog number two, Shadow. I adopted her when she was about a year old, exactly eleven days after Daisy finally passed, and she came to me as a fearful rescue, a white German Shepherd mix who started out terrified of me until I just ignored her, but once she realized that it was okay for her to sleep in my bed with me and that I gave her food, she bonded totally. Just like with Daisy, I was her human. However, she never really developed the talent that Dog 1 and Dog 3 did, and although I loved her very much, I have to say that she was the problem child I had to have in order to learn.
When Shadow was five, I decided that she needed a companion, and so I adopted Sheeba, who was 11 months old, and who had been thrown out of a car for reasons I'll never understand. What struck me about her in the shelter, though, was that she just seemed so calm — and this was even more amazing when I found out on adoption day later that week that I first saw her about two hours after she'd been brought in after being saved from the streets.
Sheeba is a lot like Daisy. Put her in a pack situation, and she goes into boss mode. The big difference with her, though, is that it's really clear that she does it physically instead of mentally. Daisy would just give a look. Sheeba tends to get in the other dog's face and puff up. (By the way, the two of them were just about the same size.)
And yes, she's gotten into her share of fights — several times with Shadow, and once or twice with friends' dogs. These mostly revolve around food, as in, "Bitch, back off my dish, or Ima hurt you." A big thing I learned when I had both Shadow and Sheeba was this, too: As a human, do not try to impose the alpha/beta roles, because it will lead to disaster. See, in my mind, I did the typical parent thing. "Older kid gets first dibs and such." Yeah, that works with humans. With dogs? Not so much.
If I'd been aware enough from the start, then I would have made Sheeba alpha, and that would have made both of them happy. Instead, I tried to make Shadow alpha, which only managed to piss off Sheeba and make Shadow even more nervous.
But… all of that said, the real point here is this: What I learned from Daisy is that dogs really do speak to us, too. We just have to learn to listen. Now, I'm not sure whether I'm the one who took so long to pick up on it, or she's the one who took so long to figure out how to train me, but… during the last five or six years of her life, I started to notice that she would approach me with intent, make eye contact, and then basically create a subject-verb-object sentence (SVO) by where she was looking.
The funny thing is that this is actually the way that English works, too. "You do this" is probably one of the simpler examples. Stripped down in dog talk, though, it omits finer points of vocabulary like adjectives and adverbs, although, to be honest, these really seem to come out of attitude — a really impatient, huffy dog is coloring the entire sentence with "fast" or "soon." In a lot of ways, that's like any form of sign language, where the tone of the sentence isn't portrayed in what the hands are doing, but rather in the face and expressions.
In that context, it makes total sense, because our dogs have basically had to figure out how to teach us how to understand their signing. And that's pretty amazing.
Both Daisy and Sheeba eventually started doing this, and it always took the same pattern. After they'd gotten my attention, they'd make eye contact, which meant "You." Then they would pointedly turn their head to look at something, so literally using an action as an action word, although I think that "Dog" probably only has one universal word that can mean do, make, get, or give. This really isn't all that far off from human languages, which not only frequently have one verb that can mean all of those things, but it's also one of the most irregular verbs in the language. (Side note: It's almost a guarantee that the verb for "to be" was, is, and/or will be ridiculously irregular through all tenses in every language.)
Anyway, so… look at me, then turn the head — subject, verb. And what happens next? Object, which is where the dog looks — their bowl, meaning "food," the sink, meaning "water," the cupboard, meaning "treat," or the door, meaning "walk," or… anything else. The point here is that the need the dog expresses it not abstract, and that is probably where the species separate.
After all, a five-year-old can tell its parents, "I want to go to Disneyland when school is out." A dog, not so much. While they may have a sense of language, they do not have a sense of time. If you doubt that, compare how excited your dog is to see you come home after five minutes vs. five hours. Not really a lot of difference, right?
A long time ago, humans naively believed that we were the only species to develop language, but that's clearly not true. If we define language as set of syntactic methods to communicate, then most species have language, and humans are not unique. We are probably unique in the sense that we alone use written or inscribed symbols to represent the sounds that make up our language, which is what you're reading right now, but we do not absolutely know that we are the only ones.
The point, really, is this: We all need to step back from this idea that humans are the superior life forms (hint: we're not) and, instead, start to listen to all of the others, and to nature itself. If you're lucky enough to have pets of any kind, start to pay attention and listen. They may be trying to tell you something, and are getting totally frustrated that you're too stupid to understand. Dog knows that this is how Daisy finally taught me.
Did I mention that the first couple of times she tried the "You give food" thing with me, she actually gave me a dirty look when I didn't get, audibly sighed in frustration, and then pointedly repeated it until I finally got it? Because that is exactly what she did. And that is why I got it the first time Sheeba did it. Which is interesting in itself, because it means that one generation of dog managed to teach me a language that I was able to understand in a much later generation, and, holy crap, how amazing is that?
Image: Daisy, Shadow, and Sheeba © Jon Bastian
How have your pets communicated with you? Let us know in the comments!
Author joncbastianPosted on 25 May, 2019 25 May, 2019 Categories BlogTags animals, communication, culture, Disneyland, dogs, English, Grammar, language, Learning, personal, pets, SVO1 Comment on Dog talk
Amazing animal adaptations to the human world
If you think that animals haven't continued to evolve in the wake of having wound up in the middle of human cities and culture, then you haven't been paying attention. Our friends — furry and otherwise — are catching up to us. And why not? Some of them try to emulate us as much as possible, while others are just really good at reading our body language. Others still are good at figuring out patterns independent of our behavior, while a final group doesn't think much, but knows how to follow instinct.
Let's start out with our emulators.
It's a typical Monday morning as you make your way from your house on the outskirts of the city to the subway station for your regular morning commute to your office downtown. You get on the train and take your seat, armed with the newspaper or touch pad or smart phone as the usual distraction, when you notice a half dozen or so unaccompanied dogs casually enter the last car with you and, like any other commuter, take their seats. They sit or lie quietly as the train heads off for the city and, as you stand to get off at the central station, so do they.
This would be an unusual sight in most major cities, but to the residents of Moscow, Russia, it has become quite routine. In the twenty years since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the changing face of this metropolis of nearly twelve million has forced its population of stray dogs to learn the ways of their human counterparts. By night, they live in the deserted industrial areas outside of the city, a canine population last estimated five years ago at 26,000. By day, they head downtown, where the people are and, more importantly, where the free food is, and they do it the same way the humans do.
No one taught the dogs how to navigate one of the world's busiest subway systems. They have managed to figure it out on their own, and have also learned the concept of traffic signals. Stray dogs have been observed waiting for the light before crossing the street, and they aren't just taking their cues from humans – they exhibit the same behavior when the streets are devoid of people. What they do take from humans are their lunches, and some enterprising dogs will use a well-timed bark to startle a hapless pedestrian into dropping their shawarma onto the pavement, to be snatched away by the successful hunter. When not using this technique, they will scavenge from dumpsters, or just hang out in busy areas waiting for the inevitable handout. They've also been known to exploit human psychology by sending in the cutest puppers in order to do the heavy-lifting of begging for the whole pack.
Yes, these dogs are playing us.
Why they have figured out these tricks is fairly obvious: their environment changed when downtown was revitalized and they had to adapt. How they do it, though, is another question, and zoologists are still studying them to figure it out. The dogs can't read signs, so their subway navigation, which includes getting on and off at the right stops, is still a mystery, as is their ability to obey a traffic light on their own. It would be one thing if they had been trained – but they have not.
This isn't the only example of animals adapting to the human world. The next group are the pattern seekers, who use repetitive and predictable cues to figure out how to safely navigate the space in order to feed.
In Japan, crows have been observed exploiting roads and traffic in order to crack nuts that they can't themselves — but the most remarkable part of this is that they use the traffic signals to tell them when it's safe to go into the road to fetch the good stuff.
Next is the animal to exploit humans by using instinct over intellect, although ultimately a bit of both: Clever Hans, a horse that appeared to know how to do simple sums and count, until it was determined that what the horse was really doing was reacting to subtle human emotions given away as the horse approached the answer. Hans could literally tell when he'd hit the right number via tapping his hoof until the humans reached maximum excitement, by which point he'd learned that "Decrease in excitement means stop."
At least this is a few orders of magnitude above the animal that reacts strictly by instinct, with no intellect involved — the "avoid that moving shadow and get out of the light" reaction common to cockroaches, who are far less intelligent than horses. They don't think about what they're doing or why. They don't have the brain capacity for that. Instead, they just automatically skittle away from things perceived as danger. This is a very common behavior among animals, and in fact extends all the way down to single-celled organisms, which will also instinctively and automatically swim away from chemical signals that they consider unpleasant or dangerous.
That's how survival and evolution work, and it's how life on Earth evolved from being mindless single-celled organisms that only know "swim toward food, swim from trouble" to the complex primates that seem to be top of the food-chain for the moment and, at least for now, have developed our technology far enough to start to fling ourselves out into the solar system.
And that process is also how we inadvertently help all of our domesticated animals to evolve, so it shouldn't be any surprise that as we develop more technology and empathy, our companions develop more empathy and intelligence. Sure, I don't know whether it's us or our pets getting smarter, or if it's a mutual act, but whichever it is doesn't matter. The only important part is that we seem to be increasing the emotional bond between ourselves and our animals that are above the purely instinctual level, since most of that latter group seem to be nothing but pests.
Maybe this will lead us to a meatless world, or at least one where all of our meat is grown in labs or fabricated from plant products. If you've never seen dancing cows, happy goats, laughable lambs, pet pigs, or even redeemed raccoon and frisky ferrets, you should. The more I learn about animals, the less I want to eat them.
Author joncbastianPosted on 23 April, 2019 23 April, 2019 Categories BlogTags animals, cesar, dog whisperer, dogs, education, science, urbanLeave a comment on Amazing animal adaptations to the human world
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Words matter, especially when you're trying to set your business or service apart from the competition.
I'm an award-winning playwright with film and TV credits, as well as a web content creator, editor, and proofreader — I do fact and fiction, but either way, it's all about telling compelling stories.
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