Talking with Animals
Two readers of my novel The Dark X told me that the least plausible scene is the one in which Suzanne, the "ape lady," talks to a hungry lion in its own language. Suzanne grew up in Africa with her missionary parents and often "adopted" young animals that had been orphaned by hunters. The lion was one she hadn't seen for years. She studies bonobos, a species of intelligent and sexy chimpanzees and has become an expert at animal-human communication. She is described by someone who has seen her in a National Geographic film as a triple-threat combination of Jane Goodall, Tarzan, and Dr. Dolittle.
Her doctor and companion Tony is amazed by her ability to read his mind, when she is really reading the facial expressions that reveal his thoughts and emotions. Charles Darwin wrote a book,The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he deduced that such expressions are hard-wired in the brain. My colleague Paul Ekman at the University of California, San Francisco, has carried this research much further and catalogued thousands of human facial expressions and what they mean. Suzanne is doing the same thing with bonobos, but she also likes to talk with other animals, including a friendly elephant. Research in recent years has shown how elephants communicate with each other in deep vocalizations that travel long distances through the earth. Monkeys make different sounds for different predators like snakes and eagles.
Like us, chimpanzees, elephants and lions are social animals who deal with each other by vocalizations, facial expressions, and body language. The readers who doubted the plausibility of Suzanne's dialogue with a lion should view the true story, now on You-Tube, of two young Englishmen who adopted and cared for a lion cub until he was big enough to go into the wild. Years later they went to Africa, tracked him down, and someone filmed him coming at their call, standing up with his forelimbs on their shoulders, and licking their faces. We talk to our dogs, cats, and horses, and they, in their way, talk to us. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a devoted scientist who grew up in the jungle carrying on conversations with her fellow-animals.
