language Archives - When We Talk About Animals

Ep. 26 – Ian Urbina on the Outlaw Ocean

Ian Urbina aboard an Indonesian patrol ship called the *Macan* as it chases several Vietnamese fishing ships in a contested area of the South China Sea. Fishing boats in the South China Sea are notorious for using “sea slaves,” migrants forced offshore by debt or other illicit means. 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats. Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.

Over 40 percent of the Earth’s surface is open ocean that is over 200 miles from the nearest shore. These international waters exist outside national jurisdiction and almost entirely free of rule of law. World-renowned investigative journalist Ian Urbina spent five years reporting about what life is like for the humans who roam these seas and about the astonishing array of extra-legal activity that goes on there. Urbina travelled to every continent and every ocean — often hundreds of miles offshore — to report stories from this vast legal void. These narratives are compiled in his best-selling book, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier.

On the high seas, environmental crimes — such as overfishing and illegal dumping — are closely linked to human rights abuses on vessels around the world. Video by The Outlaw Ocean Project.

In his years of non-stop voyages, Urbina risked his life to bear witness to the inhumanity faced by humans in these waters. He witnessed shackled slaves on fishing boats, joined high-speed chases by vigilante conservationists, rode out violent storms, and observed near mutinies. He lived on a Thai vessel where Cambodian boys worked 20-hour days processing fish on a slippery deck, shadowed a Tanzanian stowaway who was cast overboard and left to die by an angry crew, and met men who had been drugged, kidnapped and forced to cast nets for catch that would become pet food and livestock feed. These stories and many others together make The Outlaw Ocean, a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a riveting portrait of a sprawling and often dystopian world where humans, animals and the environment are regularly treated with depravity.

Urbina is transferred up the coast by local, armed Somali police forces. “For all its breathtaking beauty,” Urbina writes, “the ocean is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. The rule of law — often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes — is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.” Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.

Ep. 17 – Fabrice Schnöller on free diving with sperm whales

“Scientists have been studying dolphins for fifty years,” Schnöller says. “We know they’re communicating in a sophisticated way but we don’t know how. We knew the same thing is going on with sperm whale, but we didn’t know how because no one was going in the water.”

In 2007, our guest, Fabrice Schnöller, was sailing off the coast of Mauritius, in East Africa, when he had an encounter that would change his life and open a new frontier in marine biology. As his boat neared land, huge pillars of steam burst out of the water and began surrounding the boat. Schnöller, an experienced diver, grabbed his snorkeling gear and jumped in to investigate. No sooner had he slipped under the water than he was overwhelmed by a crashing, creaking sound. Glancing downwards, he discovered a set of what appeared to be huge, dark monoliths accelerating towards him.

“I asked myself, ‘are these clicks only used to see the world, as sonar?’ or are they also used to communicate? If they do that, it would [involve] a completely different way of communicating.” Pictured here, Schnöller dives with a sperm whale. (Photo courtesy of Fabrice Schnöller)

“[T]here are places in the world where the spoken word doesn’t travel very far,” Dr. Diana Reiss says. “In these areas, there are people who convert their spoken words into whistle languages. They whistle the prosody, or the intonation, of the spoken language… You can look at a whistle sequence that looks like a dolphin whistle or a bird whistle, and it’s actually a human sentence that is communicating enough that another could decode it. When we look at whistles of birds or dolphins, they look simple and we don’t think about what kind of information might be in there.”

For thousands of years, humans have been enthralled with dolphins. In Ancient Greece, dolphins were considered closer to the gods than any other creature, viewed as half divine messengers between men and gods. To kill a dolphin was an offense punishable by death. The second century Greco-Roman poet Oppian wrote, “Diviner than the Dolphin is nothing yet created for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals.” Reverence for these creatures was not limited to the Greeks. There are caves in the French Pyrenees with Ice Age era dolphin engravings. Stories about dolphins are part of the Australian Aborigines’ understanding of the world known as “Dreamtime.” To the Maori of New Zealand, dolphins have long been seen as water spirits who can carry messages from island to island in times of need.

“I always felt that just putting yourself aside for a moment and just seeing what you can see, hearing what you can hear, you’ll see patterns or hear patterns emerge,” Reiss says. “And that can inform what you do and the kind of questions you ask. In that way, I think we can partner with animals. My best ideas about animals come from the animals themselves.”

We are separated by 95 million years of evolution, and yet we intuitively feel a striking kinship and admiration for these intelligent creatures. Of course, mythologies like these, as our guest has pointed out, are not verified or scientific truths. “But,” she writes, “mythologies reach a different, deeper kind of truth, one that relies on resonance, not on demonstrable evidence. Mythologies do not account for the origin of people or dolphins in the way that scientific theories do, but mythologies tell us something about who we believe ourselves to be, our values and our place in the world in relation to all the other creatures of nature.”

Ep. 9 – Being Charles Foster Being a Beast

Dr. Charles Foster’s son, Tom, goes underground as a badger. “I was looking in the course of research for this book at tools that would allow me to probe the mystery of otherness simply so I wouldn’t feel as alone in the world as I suppose most of us do,” Dr. Foster says. “I wanted to convince myself that I could have a proper conversation, not at cross purposes, with my wife, and my children, and my best friend. And one way of reassuring myself that was possible was to see if I could know anything at all about creatures that are not so closely akin to me.“ (Photo courtesy of Charles Foster)

The cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser once said, “The world of experience is produced by the man who experienced it.” The same is true for all creatures. We construct our private worlds of subjective experience according to the information our senses are attuned to. The human world represents only one of all the different animal worlds. So: What is it like — what is it really like — to be another creature? What is it like to see, smell, hear, taste and feel the world as they do? What is our world like — what are we like — to another? Our guest, the extraordinarily imaginative writer and explorer Dr. Charles Foster, wanted to find out.

“I bought in to the delusion that the natural world was a resource, that it was something to be controlled, that it was something to be subdued, that it was something to be frightened of,” Dr. Foster says. “That’s the delusion of our culture, and the cancer that eats away at the center of it.”
(Photo courtesy of Charles Foster)

So, Dr. Foster got down on all fours and tried his best to do just that, picking five types of animals close to home to try to inhabit. He lived as a Welsh badger for six weeks in the woods, eating earthworms, digging an underground den, sleeping in it during the day, and navigating by scent on his hands and knees at night. As an urban fox, he curled up in backyards in London’s East End and pawed through garbage cans for dinner scraps. As an Exmoor otter, he caught fish with his teeth and attempted to differentiate bowel movements with his nose. As a red deer, he let his toenails grow like overgrown hooves and was hunted by bloodhounds. And as a common swift, he followed the birds’ migration across Europe and into West Africa. In addition to immersing himself in these animals’ physical worlds, Dr. Foster immersed himself deeply in the physiological literature about these non-human ways of life. He recounts his adventures in non-humanness in his spectacularly imaginative, unorthodox, truly hilarious, daring, and award-winning book, Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, which The New York Times called “intensely strange and terrifically vivid … an eccentric modern classic of nature writing.”

Ep. 4 – Irene Pepperberg on revolutionizing what humans think of bird brains

Dr. Irene Pepperberg, pictured here with Griffin, an African Grey Parrot, at Harvard University. (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell.)

In 1977, after finishing her doctorate in theoretical chemistry at Harvard, our guest Dr. Irene Pepperberg purchased a 1-year-old African Grey Parrot at a pet shop and named him Alex, an acronym for “Avian Language Experiment.” At the time, birds were not considered smart — but Dr. Pepperberg believed otherwise. For the next thirty years, she and Alex forged a deep bond as each other’s closest companions, and revolutionized how scientists and the public understand what it means to be “bird-brained.” Grey parrots may have walnut-sized brains, but Alex and Dr. Pepperberg showed that those brains have many capabilities long thought to be unique to primates — including the ability to speak and understand a human tongue . This feat is all the more remarkable considering that Alex’s and Dr. Pepperberg’s last common ancestor was a dinosaur that lived over 300 million years ago.

“I had to always maintain a distance,” Dr. Pepperberg says. “I always had to treat Alex as a colleague [and] put aside any feelings I had, because they couldn’t color what I was doing… I kept that [distance] until he passed, and that’s when that barrier completely shattered.” Dr. Pepperberg is pictured here with Alex, Griffin and Arthur. (Photo courtesy of Brandeis University.)

Ep. 3 — Sue Savage-Rumbaugh on speaking with bonobos, humanity’s closest living relatives

If you travel to Des Moines, Iowa and drive about 20 minutes southeast of the city center, you’ll find a large, unassuming cement complex with fenced in grounds. You’d never know it, but inside are five bonobos — including the world-famous 38-year-old Kanzi — thought to be the only remaining nonhuman apes capable of communicating verbally with humans. Not only have the bonobos in Iowa been shown to understand thousands of English words, but they are also capable of expressing wishes, plans, and opinions by pointing to pictograms developed by our guest, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, as part of her extraordinarily ambitious thirty-year investigation into their minds. (Bonobos are humanity’s closest living relatives — an egalitarian, matriarchal cousin of the chimp, sometimes called the “make love, not war” ape.) The investigation has been polarizing among researchers who study language in recent years.

*“We define humanness mostly by what other beings, typically apes, are not,”* Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh says. *“With Darwinian theory, this idea that we were special because God created us special had to be put aside. And so language became, in a way, the replacement for religion.”*

Our guest, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, is a primatologist who has received global recognition for her contributions to the field of animal cognition and psychology. She is the author or co-author of over 180 scientific articles and of eight books, including Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind and the forthcoming Dialogues on the Human Ape with Laurent Dubreuil. Her numerous awards include honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and Missouri State University, recognition from TIME magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2011, and selection by the Millennium Project as the author of one of the 100 most influential works in cognitive science in the 20th century. She currently teaches at Missouri State University and serves as president of the Bonobo Hope Initiative.

Book recommendations:

Dialogues on the Human Ape by Laurent Dubreuil and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram

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Ep. 0 – Coming Soon: When We Talk About Animals

When We Talk About Animals is a Yale University podcast devoted to exploring the big questions animals raise about what it means to be human. On each episode, we bring you a conversation with a leading thinker whose work has furthered human understanding of what animals think and feel, questioned how our society commonly talks about and treats other creatures, and/or challenged us to rethink our place in the animal kingdom. We’ll be hosting field biologists, filmmakers, neuroscientists, sociologists, journalists, philosophers, artists, legal scholars, historians and other thinkers to speak on one of the most interdisciplinary and morally pressing topics of our time. The series is supported by Yale University’s Human Nature Lab and produced by the Yale Broadcast Studio. Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, or Stitcher.

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