How to Speak Whale: The Power and Wonder of Listening to Animals

by Tom Mustill

the

But here is Britt and Aza’s example of the top ten thousand most spoken words in English compressed down to a 3D picture.

then planned to combine these with machines that find

Before we knew any of these things, we decided that they were inferior to us and our human ancestors.

Human beings are called Homo sapiens, or “thinking man.” One suggestion for the scientific name for the Neanderthals was Homo stupidus.

But we were wrong. We have since discovered that Neanderthals were not only powerful and brave, but smart, too, with finds indicating they teamed up to make w...

Because they disappeared, the leading assumption had been that we, the dominant, superior hominid, had outcompeted our primitive relatives and killed them off.

as many as 2 percent of our genes are from Neanderthal ancestors. Our species met, mingled, and mated.

Anthropocentrism, or the conviction that humans are exceptional, made us group Homo neanderthalensis into a mental category with all the other animals, despite their clear resemblance to us.

Bias, I now believe, is the final obstacle if we are to try to speak whale.

Part of it was logical: We do not currently speak whale, whales do not speak human, ergo it cannot happen.

But there was something else, something deeper that recoiled emotionally, a belief that “speaking whale” was a ridiculous notion: that there was no point trying to speak to a whale because they can’t speak; that they’re not capable of having thoughts you might engage with.

(I think, therefore I am).

Descartes felt it was a reasonable idea that “nature should produce its own automata much more splendid than the artificial ones. These natural automata are the animals.” Other species were not like us, he claimed. They were simply biological machines.

What was vital was the unique human gift of rational thought. Animals could feel, but they did not really think—and proof of this was their inability to communicate beyond biological imperatives.

Descartes was by no means the first human to place our species above others.

the scala natura, or Great Chain of Being,

A hierarchy of everything and everyone on Earth, with gods at the top followed by lesser supernatural beings, then kings and other elite mortals, then bog-standard people. Underneath those humans were the animals considered most important and useful, followed by animals considered less useful, and so on, with the lowest rungs composed of inanimate things, like minerals and rocks.

scala natura was a simple way of knowing your place and keeping others in theirs.

kings and popes whose legitimacy depended on a hierarchical world, with Earth the center of the universe and with them at the top of the earthly order.

explain why we were special.

What they found chipped away at ideas of European and Christian and royal specialness, although they continued relying on those ideas to justify the colonizing and exploitation of many of those they “discovered.”

We had thought ourselves a special planet in the center of the solar system, itself the center of a small universe. Now we understood this was not so. We knew, too, that instead of being created in our God’s image, we had evolved slowly and blindly from fishy sea creatures, and our closest kin were the apes.

our leading role, seemed diminished.

Yet beyond this scientific and intellectual progress, one story remained resilient: the story we told about other animals. Here, we were still exceptional. In the words of the contemporary philosopher Melanie Challenger, “the world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it is an animal.”

“When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?”

Did these comparisons of animal experiences and abilities with our own tug at something deeper, an instinct that was not perhaps that of a scientist wanting precision but of a human still searching for exceptionalism?

when we dismiss an animal’s behavior when it seems able to do something a human can do: “anthropodenial.”

Yet I feel the same flaws underpin dolphin worship—anthropomorphism and anthropodenial. Each is too simple, lacking in evidence, and relies on the projection of exceptionalism of either humans or dolphins.

Is it so wrong to assume an animal can think and feel, and look for proof otherwise, rather than to assume it cannot and require proof that it can?

I once asked Roger Payne what he thought had been holding us back for so long from trying to speak to animals. “It’s exactly like white supremacy, only it’s human supremacy,” he said, “and like white supremacy, it’s based entirely on fear.” I think he’s right. We are right to be afraid of what we might discover. Giving up the privileges that you have enjoyed over others is a frightening thought.

“The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

where seventeen experts reviewed 659 scientific papers—found “examples of higher levels of consciousness in domestic livestock.”

he had “struggled with whether this was the right decision.” He believed this was not the end of the “profound and far-reaching” matter.

This “speaks to our relationship with all the life around us,” wrote the judge. He continued, “In elevating our species, we should not lower the status of other highly intelligent species.”

The more we learn about other animals and discover evidence of their manifold capacities, the more we care, and this alters how we treat them.

At the end of this investigation, I therefore think we have a choice: to continue to believe whatever we want about the inner worlds and communications of cetaceans and other species and project it onto them, or to make the effort of finding out what is really there.

As the Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg put it in a film we made together, “Because we are part of nature, when we protect nature, we are nature protecting itself.”

And as we accelerate further into this mass extinction, with each species we lose, we lose forever the unique way in which it sensed and processed the world. Our human exceptionalism has cost us dearly.

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!”

“challenge our complacent conviction—so easy to lapse into—that the world has been made for humans by humans…