Bonus 27: Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals

Wouldn't it be cool if we could teach animals to have conversations with humans? Well, alright, that's a bit ambitious -- what if we just teach animals to understand us? Okay, perhaps that's too much as well -- what about just trying to understand what animals are saying to each other? Attempts to study communication between animals and humans have had decidedly mixed results, but the efforts are still very interesting! 

In this bonus episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about interspecies communication, involving dogs, cats, apes, horses, crows, ravens, parrots, dolphins, bees, and even...plants? We also get into the important considerations around designing a research study to actually teach and test whether animals understand what they're communicating, or whether they're just responding to hidden cues in our body language (which itself is already an interesting ability, but one of a different kind). 

Thanks to patron Janelle Shane for suggesting this topic! 

New Lingthusiasm merch! 

We also have new Lingthusiasm merch available! New scarves with our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, baby onesies saying Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project, plus expanding all the scarves (IPA, tree diagram, and esoteric symbols) to mugs and notebooks. See more info, pictures, and links to the merch here. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Lingthusiasm merch  
• Clever Hans (Wikipedia)
• Dogs, cats and pointing (Miklósi et al. 2015)
• Chaser the border collie 
• Iron Spike on apes and language (Twitter)
• Kanzi (Wikipedia)
• Nim Chimpsky (Wikipedia)
• Crows that 'caw' 
• Ravens problem-solving 
• Ravens social thinking 
• Alex the parrot (Wikipedia)
• Dolphin Mysteries: Unlocking the Secrets of Communication 
• Dolphin vocalisation (Wikipedia)
• Friendly otter 
• Friendly octopus 
• Honeybee dance 
• Fresh cut grass 
• Plants that listen (Gastropod)
• More on animals and language from All Things Linguistic 

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript is available for this episode as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page.

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All ThingsLinguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are A.E. Prevost and Sarah Dopierala, our editorial producer is Emily Gref and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.