August 20, 2020 53
When Animals Speak:
Toward an Interspecies Democracy
by Eva Meijer.
NYU Press,
291 pp., $99.00; $35.00 (paper)
Animal Languages
by Eva Meijer,
translated from the Dutch
by Laura Watkinson.
MIT Press, 276 pp., $27.95
Animal Internet :
Nature and the Digital Revolution
by Alexander Pschera,
translated from the German
by Elisabeth Lauffer and
with a foreword by Martin Wikelski.
New Vessel, 207 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Nightingales in Berlin:
Searching for the Perfect Sound
by David Rothenberg.
University of Chicago Press,
179 pp., $26.00
Bryony Lavery’s 2018 play Slime re-
volves around seven young interns at
the Third Annual Slime Crisis Confer-
ence, which takes place at an unspeci-
fied time in a not- too- distant future. It
is a multispecies gathering, convened in
response to a toxic slime that is taking
over the world’s oceans. The interns’
job is to interpret the squawks, squeaks,
and groans of the cormorants, seals,
guillemots, toads, and other animals in
attendance, and to encourage all species
to participate in the proceedings. While
these efforts meet with mixed success,
the idealistic translators see their work
as a righteous cause. “We’re second-
generation Animal communicators...
so like... linguistically evolved,” says
one:
We’ve benefited hugely from that
really brilliant major paradigm
thought shift... from “animals
can’t talk”...to Humans actually
pouring resources into learning
their languages...their rich com-
plex fantastic communication
skills... understanding what ani-
mals tell us.Humans have spent decades try-
ing to teach other animals our lan-
guages—sometimes for convenience or
amusement, sometimes out of scientific
curiosity—but we’ve made little effort
to learn theirs. Today, as a virus from
another species upends human society,
the usefulness of communicating with
animals on their own terms is suddenly
more imaginable. Perhaps Slime’s trans-
lators, hauled unwillingly back in time,
could facilitate conversations among
all parties to our pandemic, revealing
not only how an animal virus became a
human virus but what animals need and
want in order to sustain our coexistence:
for example, as the philosopher Eva
Meijer writes, “the ways they want to live
their lives, what types of relationships
they desire with one another and with
humans, and how we can and should
share the planet that we all live on.”
Meijer, a Dutch writer, musician,
animal ethicist, and postdoctoral re-
searcher in philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Wageningen, published her first
book about interspecies communica-
tion in 2016. That book, Animal Lan-
guages, is now available in English, as
is her more recent and more ambitious
When Animals Speak: Toward an In-
terspecies Democracy. In both, Meijer
uses a deliberately broad definition of
language—one that includes gestures,
songs, alarm calls, and other behav-
iors—to argue that humans should
learn to understand what animals are
telling us, for their protection and ours.
For animals, as she writes, “have been
speaking to us all along.”
Theorists of animal rights, most
prominently Peter Singer and Tom
Regan, have traditionally focused on
the “negative rights” of animals, such
as the rights not to be killed, tortured,
or confined by humans.^1 The field has
paid relatively little attention to hu-
mans’ positive duties toward other an-
imals—their responsibility to protect
sufficient habitat for other species, for
instance, or to consider their safety
when designing buildings and roads.
The assumption, and implication, is
that the best thing humans can do to
protect animals is to stay as far away
from them as possible.
But animals are stuck with us on this
planet, and we are stuck with them.
They live with us in our homes, invited
or not, and pass through our daily lives,
noticed or not. They pester us, threaten
us, entertain us, and, as we have been
recently reminded, infect us—as we in-
fect them in turn. Whether or not we
eat them, we consume their habitats,
and compete with them for resources.
Some might well be better off without
us; others depend on us for survival,
and we depend on them. Like it or
not—and some of them surely do not—
we exist in relationship with animals.
The scholarly emphasis on negative
rights, along with the work of animal-rights and animal- welfare activists, has
arguably improved the treatment of
domesticated animals in North Amer-
ica and Europe. Public opposition to
animal cruelty is now widespread, and
recent laws and policies have banned
animal blood sports. The insights of
advocates such as Temple Grandin
have helped us imagine how other spe-
cies experience the world, and begin to
curb some of the most brutal factory-
farming practices.
None of these advances, however,
has changed our fundamental relation-
ship with animals—which is hardly
sustainable, ethically or otherwise. In
Slime, when one of the translators fi-
nally succeeds in communicating with a
bump- nosed parrotfish from the Pacific
Ocean, the message is stark, delivered
in dramatic terms: “You are helping
Slime to kill us You You You Land
Monsters!!! Why? Stop? Why? Change
your swimming! Change your swim-
ming! Change your swimming!!!!”
Were Slime written today, it might in-
clude a line from a pangolin or a bat,
warning that our heedless exploitation
of animals carries deadly risks for all.
Meijer argues that ethical rela-
tionships between humans and ani-
mals—like all relationships—require
communication, whether through
words, sound, behavior, or other means.
And because so many animals can
intelligibly communicate their needs
and wants, agreement and resistance,
she proposes that they are, in a sense,
political actors, deserving of a part in
human political systems.The best- known pairs of animal–
human communicators have bridged
the species gap using some form of
human language. Alex the gray par-
rot and the animal psychologist Irene
Pepperberg, who worked with Alex for
more than thirty years, shared a vo-
cabulary of about 150 English words.
(Alex could also recognize and identify
fifty different objects, make jokes, andcorrect his trainers’ mistakes.) Chaser
the border collie, trained by the psy-
chologist John Pilley, could identify
and retrieve more than a thousand dif-
ferent toys by name and understand
elements of English grammar. Koko
the gorilla, taught a form of American
Sign Language by the linguist Francine
Patterson, could sign over a thousand
words and understand two thousand
spoken words.
Of course, animals can communi-
cate with members of their own spe-
cies, and do so in varied, sometimes
astonishingly complex ways, many of
which Meijer describes in both Animal
Languages and the opening chapters
of When Animals Speak. Prairie dogs
use their twittering alarm calls to de-
scribe approaching humans in detail,
including information about their size,
the color of their hair and clothes, and
any objects they might be carrying.
The intra species conversations of oc-
topuses, bees, and many birds follow
a recognizable grammatical structure.
Dolphins have unique names for one
another, as do certain species of par-
rots, monkeys, and bats.
Humans do learn and employ ele-
ments of other species’ “languages.” Bi-
ologists use recordings of animal sounds
to elicit responses from their subjects;
birdwatchers mimic songbird alarm
calls to draw their quarries into the
open; dog trainers mimic alpha- dog be-
havior in order to command obedience.
When Jane Goodall began her famous
observations of chimpanzees in Tan-
zania in 1960, she earned the chimps’
trust in part by copying their behavior
and pretending to eat their foods.
Only a very few humans have at-
tempted to communicate more fully
with animals in their own languages.
In the 1970s, as Meijer recounts, the
American anthropologist and psychol-
ogist Barbara Smuts spent two years
immersed in the daily life of a troupe
of olive baboons in eastern Africa, fol-
lowing them every day from dawn to
dusk. Instead of trying to stay out of
sight, as most wildlife researchers do,
Smuts watched the baboons’ commu-
nications with one another carefully,
without hiding her presence, and over
time began to imitate their sounds and
gestures. The baboons, she reported
later, appeared to be trying to un-
derstand her despite her “outrageous
human accent,” and as she adapted
her behavior to theirs, she felt that she
was beginning to see the world through
their eyes. She learned to read the
weather as they did and predict when
the troupe would want to move before
a storm.
Meijer does not propose that we in-
filtrate our local deer herds, though she
would probably endorse the attempt.
While the project indicated by her
subtitle—of working toward an “inter-
species democracy”—is radical, her
suggestions for first steps are appeal-
ingly humble, including an example she
recounts from her own life: adopting
her dog Olli, who came from a Roma-
nian shelter, she met him for the first
time when he arrived at the Amster-
dam airport, along with nine other dogs
and two chaperones, in November 2013.
When Olli moved into Meijer’s
house, he had little trust in people and(^1) See their exchange of letters in these
pages on the tenth anniversary of the
publication of Singer’s
(HarperCollins, 1975): “The Dog in the
Lifeboat: An Exchange,” April 25, 1985.
Illustrations by Tom Bachtell
Buzz Buzz Buzz
Michelle Nijhuis